An overdose of subplots blunts the impact of the main event.
St. Denis chief of police Bruno Courreges helps his mentor solve a case that’s puzzled him for decades.
Chief Detective Jalipeau, known to his closest friends as J-J, keeps a skull on his desk in the South of France. Not as a memento mori but as a reminder that as far as he’s risen, there’s still one case—his first—that he’s been unable to solve. Then Bruno gets a brain wave. While looking at displays of Neanderthals in the local museum, he wonders: Why can’t whoever restored these primitive folk help J-J reconstruct Oscar, as he calls his bony souvenir? Bruno tracks down anthropologist Elisabeth Daynès, who recommends Virginie, a graduate student who’s ready for a new challenge. While Virginie is hard at work re-creating Oscar’s musculature, Bruno has a second idea. Why not trace Oscar’s DNA through modern data banks? He quickly gets a hit and just as quickly hits a wall. Oscar had a son, a soldier named Louis Castignac, who was recently killed in action in Mali. As Castignac’s half sister, Sabine, who happens to be a gendarme, helps Bruno try to figure out who her brother's biological father was, Bruno deals with a host of other entanglements. His cousin Alain is getting married. His basset hound, Balzac, has just sired a litter, and he wants to choose two perfect homes for the puppies he will receive as a stud fee. His journalist friends Gilles and Jacqueline have caused a stir by publishing articles about the Rosenholz dossier, a secret document containing names of French agents who worked for the Stasi. Perhaps most urgent, drought has threatened St. Denis with wildfires, and Bruno must band together with the other villagers to protect their farms and their homes.
An overdose of subplots blunts the impact of the main event.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-65667-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
A terrifying page-turner with the complexities of fatherhood at its core.
The serial killer who terrorized a small British town by kidnapping and murdering five little boys has been locked up for over a decade. So who could have taken 6-year-old Neil Spencer?
"The first forty-eight hours following a disappearance are the most crucial." And yet one of those hours has gone by the time Neil's separated parents realize he never made it from his father's house to his mother's, a short walk he took alone. One of the main investigators of the crime is DI Pete Willis, who cracked a similar case years back and has never quite recovered from it, especially since one of the missing boys was never found. Is there an accomplice still on the loose? As Willis and his colleagues comb the town for clues about the disappearance, a recently widowed novelist and his young son move into what they don't yet know is called "the scary house." Jake is a bright but isolated child who has relied heavily on an imaginary friend and a Packet of Special Things for comfort since he came home from school one day to find his mother's lifeless body at the foot of the stairs. This move is meant to be a much-needed fresh start for the grieving and bewildered father and son, but from the start nothing goes right. On Jake's first day at his new school, the other children draw him into discussion about the missing boy and the Whisper Man who took him. Soon enough, Jake hears whispering too. North's novel pits nasty men submerged in evil against decent men struggling to do good; several father-son pairs reflect the challenges and darker possibilities of this relationship, though plotlines involving female characters are a bit undeveloped.
A terrifying page-turner with the complexities of fatherhood at its core.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31799-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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