While not every aspect is sidesplittingly funny in Milieu, readers are unlikely to forget it.
A novel offers a zany murder investigation.
At the outset of Hoffmann’s ambitious series opener, a village named Backwater (which exists in a world called Milieu, a place “a couple of realities to the left of our own”) is beset with alligators. Although there are some fatalities, things more or less return to normal once the attack subsides. Nevertheless, Backwater has bigger problems. A Ruskovian diplomat named Oliver Olivovich Garky is found dead. Sir Septimus Farquhar-Urquhart is sent to investigate. Septimus, accompanied by his faithful dwarf, Foxgang, goes about piecing together this seemingly straightforward murder in a world that is anything but. Milieu is a place where caring for an imaginary dog is not unheard of and sea gulls have their own Sudoku. Or at least one sea gull does. A major impediment to Septimus’ investigation is the prefect of Backwater, Johnny Toobad. Toobad, who has at his disposal a hyperintelligent sea gull with a penchant for children’s fingers, is not particularly keen on helping anyone but himself. But Toobad’s attitude, along with just about everything else surrounding the murder of Garky, is open to more twists, as one character phrases it, than a “human bowel.” Violent, overflowing with vulgar humor (the equivalent of Facebook in this world is called “TwatFace”), and never short on magic (Septimus is also helped by “were-weasels”), the narrative is wild indeed. Yet it all progresses smoothly, like a raunchy, unsettling police procedural in the spirit of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Still, the comedy has its limits. The were-weasel members of Septimus’ team are not nearly as amusing or endearing as, say, poor Foxgang, who, as a dwarf, takes everything literally and struggles to understand idioms. One were-weasel, on the other hand, has the ability to pull just about anything out of a magic rucksack. This talent is not quite as much fun as it sounds. Yet in the end, this bawdy mélange never ceases to astound.
While not every aspect is sidesplittingly funny in Milieu, readers are unlikely to forget it.Pub Date: May 3, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 295
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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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