The field is so rich, in fact, that veteran editor Edwards (Miraculous Mysteries, 2017, etc.) can’t have had much trouble in...
Despite Colin Watson’s witty averral that golden-age mystery writers restricted their crimes to the mythical village of Mayhem Parva, quite a few of them crossed the Channel, as this collection of 14 past voyages, originally published between 1898 and 1959, eloquently attests.
The two best stories here are the most frequently anthologized: G.K. Chesterton’s “The Secret Garden,” his second Father Brown story, a locked-garden tale that boldly burns bridges he erected in his first, and H.C. Bailey’s “The Long Dinner,” in which the insufferable Reggie Fortune teases out the links between a vanished English painter and a monstrously clever murder scheme. Of the lesser-known reprints, top honors go to F. Tennyson Jesse’s “The Lover of St. Lys,” in which Solange Fontaine, that quiet specialist in evil, susses out the truth about a French domestic intrigue; Stacy Aumonier’s bright, dry “The Perfect Murder,” in which a pair of impecunious brothers plot their wealthy aunt’s demise with predictably unpredictable results; and “The New Catacomb,” Arthur Conan Doyle’s eerie, updated take on “The Cask of Amontillado.” Also along for the trip are Arnold Bennett (an eminently guessable puzzle that restores a bracelet accidentally dropped into a Bruges canal), E. Phillips Oppenheim (ceremonious upper-crust maneuvering around some missing military plans), Ian Hay (sprightly wartime thefts-cum-espionage), Marie Belloc Lowndes (charming Hercules Popeau shows why he was such a powerful inspiration for Agatha Christie), J. Jefferson Farjeon (an Englishman rents a Rhine castle with a haunted tower), H. de Vere Stacpoole (a routine murder in glittering Monte Carlo), Josephine Bell (a drastically compressed romantic triangle gone wrong), and Michael Gilbert (the suspicious drowning of a Byronic poet whose visit to an Italian villa ends abruptly). Readers who like this sort of thing will find every single story, even if it isn’t outstanding, well worth their time.
The field is so rich, in fact, that veteran editor Edwards (Miraculous Mysteries, 2017, etc.) can’t have had much trouble in plucking these plums and near-plums—a feast for the equally nostalgic.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0748-8
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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