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NAUGHTY ON ICE

Charming one-liners battle overelaborate setups with insufficient payoffs that are serious distractions from the latest...

Called to Vermont by an anonymous letter, two female detectives break down Prohibition barriers to enjoy themselves while getting into trouble on a case.

Mrs. Woodby and Mrs. Lundgren, or Lola and Berta, have never been quite the ladies that Prohibition-era New York society requires them to be. They’d rather pursue investigations as The Discreet Retrieval Agency than keep house, and not just because neither has a husband. Mrs. Woodby has had a more traditional life, with Berta as her maid, but the two are happier in the throes of a mystery than in more boringly comfortable luxury. When their professional services are requested to recover a stolen ring—an invitation that arrives in an anonymous note—the two look at the request as an adventure rather than a questionable case. To Vermont they go, where they’ve been bidden to crash the Goddard family’s fancy party, recover the ring from mischievous, demented Great Aunt Daphne, and return it to a breadbox so that it can be restored to…whomever it is who’s hired them. More questions might be posed by those less keen for adventure, like the police, who are called in when the plot goes surprisingly, yet predictably, awry. Matriarch Judith Goddard is killed at the gathering, and the authorities are more inclined to suspect those out-of-town party crashers Mrs. Woodby and Mrs. Lundgren rather than any of Judith’s adult children, Fenton, George, or Rosemary, who might (imagine that!) be looking to inherit early. Now stuck in snowy Vermont with few options for fashionable attire, the ladies use their wiles and their luck to unravel the mystery while Berta is wooed by suitors determined to keep her in the great north against Mrs. Woodby’s strenuous objections.

Charming one-liners battle overelaborate setups with insufficient payoffs that are serious distractions from the latest developments in Chance’s enjoyable, tangent-filled series (Gin and Panic, 2017, etc.).

Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-250-10907-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Minotaur

Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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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THE LIFE WE BURY

Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...

A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.

Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk. 

Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.

Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7

Page Count: 300

Publisher: Seventh Street Books

Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014

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