The author has written nonfiction books about terrorism and repression, and contemporary parallels may be found in this...
Set in 16th-century Spain, this colorful detective story combines sex, violence, the Inquisition, and ambition-fueled intrigue that stretches from bailiffs to noblemen in high places.
When an exceptionally vile priest is slain in his village church in 1584, the circumstances arouse fears that the area’s converted Moors, or Moriscos, are being incited to revolt against Christianity by a man calling himself the Redeemer. Leading the murder investigation is a criminal judge named Bernardo de Mendoza, a 34-year-old veteran of the anti-Moor battle of Lepanto and the Granada War. Along with his teenage scribe, Gabriel, whom he rescued in Granada, and a lusty, hard-fighting cousin named Luis de Ventura, Mendoza travels to the Pyrenees village of Belamar de la Sierra in the Cardona region of Aragon to dig into a case that grows more complicated by the day. A key figure is the beautiful widowed Countess of Cardona, who controls politically important territory but lacks a male heir. Yet she still fends off marriage proposals from the nasty son of the nastier Baron Vallcarca—especially unwelcome for a juicy reason that shan’t be revealed here. Unlike the Monty Python gag, everyone in Aragon expects the Spanish Inquisition, which frequently comes onstage to torture confessions out of invariably innocent perps. As more murders and motives emerge, the priest’s demise proves to be only a small piece in a religious, political, and sexual jigsaw. Carr (Fortress Europe, 2012, etc.), a journalist and historian, lets out the stays for his meandering fiction debut, getting a tad melodramatic here and there but without ripping any bodices. He has a strong character in Mendoza as well as good sidekicks in gawky Gabriel and the usefully reckless Ventura.
The author has written nonfiction books about terrorism and repression, and contemporary parallels may be found in this novel, but it stands well on its own as an entertaining historical mystery.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-10198-273-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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