Too many coppers, too many conversations that go nowhere, too little chance to examine the lead villain and too long a...
Want to know why DI Tom Thorne is such a depressive type? Just take a look at his caseload.
The centerpiece in Tom Thorne’s sixth outing (The Burning Girl, 2005, etc.) is the kidnapping of Luke Mullen, 16, whose parents didn’t even phone the CID until he’d been missing for three days. We just thought he was staying with a mate on Friday night, they tell the Kidnap Unit unconvincingly on Monday. Even though there’s been no ransom demand, Thorne can find no excuse for Luke’s father Tony, who put in years on the job before resigning as a Chief Superintendent in 2001, the year after Grant Freestone, a pedophile who’d threatened Tony before he was sentenced, got out of the nick. Now Thorne and his colleagues—especially DI Louise Porter of the Kidnap Unit, the latest recipient of Thorne’s half-hearted romantic overtures—are bearing down on Freestone, mainly because Freestone’s girlfriend has just died violently, right after she’d been informed of her boyfriend’s proclivities, and they have no other suspects. Meanwhile, a friend of Amin Latif, an engineering student who was sexually assaulted and kicked to death six months ago, says he can identify one of the killers, even though this suspect, schoolboy Adrian Farrell, shows no signs of discomfort. At length, Chief Inspector Callum Roper, who heads the Special Enquiries Team, will uncover a list of people who met to determine Freestone’s fate—a list that holds the key to the mystery. By that time, though, Billingham will have sprung his biggest surprise, a twist that gives the kidnapping a truly unsettling edge.
Too many coppers, too many conversations that go nowhere, too little chance to examine the lead villain and too long a wind-up (the author refuses to reveal the perp’s name even when all the relevant characters know it). But there’s no denying the energy behind Billingham’s probing, or the power of his dark imagination.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-125569-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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
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