A historically realistic and dramatically enthralling crime story.
An international murder mystery, largely set in London in 1941, that also dramatizes the withering impact of World War II on Europe.
British Capt. Simon Arbuthnot is mortally wounded in Crete when his unit is strafed by German warplanes. As he takes his last breath, he hands a bloody envelope to Lt. Edgar Powell and asks him to ensure its safe delivery. However, bad handwriting and bloodstains obscure the name of the addressee, leaving Powell with a mystery that he feels bound by honor to solve. He turns to DCI Frank Merlin, an old friend, for help. Meanwhile, Arbuthnot’s son and heir, Philip, slowly learns that his father’s business interests were as mysterious as they were vast and potentially the result of unsavory dealings. Merlin goes on to investigate the death of a young woman found in a gruesome condition in a London hotel room. She’s the victim of an illegal abortion gone wrong, and Merlin is quickly able to establish that the physician who botched the procedure is Armand de Metz, a once-prominent surgeon who fled his native France during the Nazi occupation. The doctor is soon found murdered, apparently by a professional killer. Further complicating matters, de Metz was evidently in touch with MI5 agents, promising to deliver information relevant to the war effort, and the deceased girl turns out to have been under suspicion due to her active support of the Irish Republican Army. This is the third installment in author Ellis’ (Stalin’s Gold, 2014, etc.) DCI Frank Merlin series, which not only brings back the titular detective, but also some familiar themes: the danger posed to London by German bombing campaigns, the underground French Resistance to both German occupation and a collaborationist Vichy government, and the moral degradation of a city that lives under the shadow of death. As always, the author displays a penetrating knowledge of the historical period, conjuring an authentic depiction of 1941 London. Overall, the plot is an exceedingly complicated one that will require a reader’s focused attention. Thankfully, though, despite the story’s complexity, it’s all related in a crisp, unclouded prose style.
A historically realistic and dramatically enthralling crime story.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9955667-0-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: London Wall Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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