Beautiful writing about so many sad and disturbing things in a riveting crime story.
In 1975 rural Kansas, some aimless young men—many of them Vietnam veterans—grow hemp without repercussions until they clash with a rival group versed in murder.
In this first volume of Litton’s Kansas Murder Trilogy, “the boys”—including handsome Frankie Sage, one-eyed Jacko Kelly, confident Will Wolnofsky, fun-loving Gabe Swenson, and Lee Clayton, who has “a pretty wife”—have no money or worthwhile plans and little education. But they realize they can profit by growing, drying, and bagging hemp. Somebody else will sell it, as they know selling leads to the murkier side of things, and “Frankie always cautioned, ‘It’s not the law, it’s our own kind we’ve gotta watch out for.’ ” Indeed, the entry of a vicious rival group coincides with a brutal double murder. Dead are a teenage girl and her boyfriend, who recently told others that he “saw something.” The homicide investigation dovetails with the increasingly dangerous hemp harvesting and selling. A spooky subplot has Lee and his wife and young child thinking that ghosts reside in their house. The author excels at storytelling and characterization, creating a mood of loneliness. The frustration and desperation of being poor are vividly illustrated. Litton also shines at establishing a sense of place; for example, a farm carries the rich scents “of autumn grasses, cattle grazing, the milo harvest, and the broad blankets of turned-up soil.” Vibrant details enrich the novel: the clink of a glass, the swish of a dress, the yips of coyotes accompanying the wail of a distant train. The author gets the feel of the ’70s just right—the cars (Ford Fairlanes, GTOs), the clothes, and the songs. Lee keeps his radio tuned to a country station, and Litton gets bonus points for referencing not just “City of New Orleans” and its singer, Arlo Guthrie, but also the songwriter, Chicagoan Steve Goodman. Still, racist language, used infrequently, is jarring, and descriptions of cruelty to people and animals—chickens, puppies, and a beloved old bull—are hard to read.
Beautiful writing about so many sad and disturbing things in a riveting crime story.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63789-875-8
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Gordian Knot Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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