Though it works against suspense and urgency, the emphasis on the regular cast pays off this time in a truly traumatic...
Sharon McCone’s search for the missing daughter of a pair of old friends leads her to a flurry of crimes old and new.
From their vacation in far-off Costa Rica, Trish and Jim Curley reach out to McCone when their daughter, Michelle, already a successful real estate rehabber at 23, stops answering her phone. It’s true, says Zack Kaplan, one of the two remaining tenants in the Breakers, Chelle’s current project: He hasn’t seen her for a week. Having dismissed Damon Delahanty, the ex-con boyfriend working with her on the Breakers, Chelle has been down to two other helpers, Al Majewski and Ollie Morse, and one other tenant, self-avowed wizard Tyler Pincus, who seems incapable of kidnapping or killing the woman who was trying to evict him. The most disturbing piece of evidence left behind, a “wall of horrors” in Chelle’s stripped-down bedroom that displays newspaper clippings of celebrated Bay Area murderers, has been there ever since an earlier tenant, aspiring true-crime writer Bruno Storch, posted the clippings there years ago. But it’s one of those items, the one featuring a shadowy figure called the Carver who’s still at large after killing half a dozen men, that provides the crucial connection when Zack is stabbed to death in a vacant lot in Outer Richmond. Fans may feel that the mystery of Zack’s death and Chelle’s disappearance is upstaged by another season of The Sharon McCone Show, with updates on every recurring character from McCone’s Shoshone birth father, Elwood Farmer, now finally recovered from his brutal beating by white supremacists (The Color of Fear, 2017), to her free-spirited adoptive mother, Katie McCone, to her husband and partner, Hy Ripinsky, to her favorite operatives and more distant relatives.
Though it works against suspense and urgency, the emphasis on the regular cast pays off this time in a truly traumatic development you can bet Muller will be exploring in further detail in her next installment.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4555-3893-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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