A layered and fast-paced mystery that also takes time to explore the importance of Darwin’s work.
Three detectives investigate the disappearance of Charles Darwin’s daughter-in-law in Squire’s historical mystery.
Archibald Line, London’s former chief of detectives, is already investigating the sender of a mysterious, threatening letter sent to scientist Charles Darwin’s home when he is called back to assist with a more pressing matter: the disappearance of Darwin’s daughter-in-law Henrietta. Line soon learns that Henrietta has been missing for four days and that the current chief of detectives, Jeremiah Fickett, is already on the case. Line also sends a personal note to Dunston Burnett, a retired bookkeeper who initially seems positioned as a Watson-like figure to Line’s Holmes, though Burnett soon launches his own investigation. Interspersed between these three strands of investigation is the initially curious story of Lucy Kinsley, a woman fallen on hard times who has just had her baby taken from her when Lucy is officially pronounced dead (though she’s still alive). Traversing these eventually converging narrative paths, Squire presents different views of Victorian London. The Lucy sections are particularly grimy: “The nurse on duty was asleep in a chair, totally oblivious to the ugly sounds issuing from the forty or so beds crammed into the ward. If the moaning, sobbing, and occasional scream were not enough to wake her, then quiet-as-a-mouse Lucy was not likely to disturb her.” The author also skillfully creates tension by cross-cutting between the investigative threads. By the time another letter appears at the Darwins’ doorstep, and a body that might be Henrietta’s is discovered along the Thames, readers will be racing through the chapters. Lucy’s section slows the momentum in the first third of the novel, but her role in the mystery becomes clearer as the story unfolds. Alongside the sleuthing runs a discussion of the transformational impact of Darwin’s work and the fiery response it received from religious leaders and believers.
A layered and fast-paced mystery that also takes time to explore the importance of Darwin’s work.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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