Fans of Nordic crime fiction have a new author to follow.
The discovery of a mummified Norseman in the blinding Greenlandic ice cap—perhaps the archaeological find of the century—goes bad when the mummy disappears and the officer who had been guarding it overnight is left in a bloody heap, gutted like a seal.
Nordbo debuts in English with this lurid noir. Protagonist Matthew Cave, a journalist, finds his dream of scoring an international scoop complicated when the mummy find becomes a murder investigation. Plagued by personal demons, including the recent death of his pregnant wife and a father who disappeared years earlier, Matthew is bemoaning the fact that his newspaper won't publish his article about the mummy when his editor mentions a series of 40-year-old deaths that might be worth looking into. These unsolved cases featured flayed adult victims as well as missing girls, and they seem reminiscent of the recent murder. When Matthew starts looking into the cold cases, a police officer named Ottesen gives him a diary he's found in the files; it belonged to Jakob Pedersen, an officer who worked on the 1970s murders and then disappeared. This leads to parallel protagonists and timelines. Ottesen gave Matthew the diary because his own father worked with Pedersen, but the other cops aren't happy when they learn that Matthew has it. Meanwhile, Matthew becomes obsessed with Tupaarnaq Siegstad, a suspect in the recent murder, who's just been freed from prison after having served time in Denmark for killing her family, including her father, whom she gutted, when she was 15. Tupaarnaq offers to take Matthew hunting, then compels him to eat raw seal liver—"You can't come home after your first seal hunt without having tasted warm liver. Those are the rules, and they apply to you too"—and later to carry a leaking bloody plastic bag bursting with chunks of seal meat for miles. These scenes and others offer intriguing glimpses of Greenland, its relentless summer light and oppressive winter darkness. While the mystery is dramatically resolved, readers will want to learn what’s next for the bereaved Matthew, who learns a little more about his missing father in the midst of this investigation.
Fans of Nordic crime fiction have a new author to follow.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-925603-83-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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