Bosch fan or McCaleb fan, you can’t lose with this chilling tour-de-force.
Connelly pits his latest series hero, FBI agent Terry McCaleb (Blood Work, 1998), against his veteran series op, LAPD detective Harry Bosch (Angels Flight, 1999, etc.), in this extraordinary excursion into good, evil, and the labyrinth of human motives.
Enjoying the good life over a year after his heart transplant and blissfully happy with his wife, stepson, and new baby daughter, McCaleb thinks he’s retired to run a fishing charter off Catalina Island. Actually, though, he’s the one who gets hooked. His old partner, Jaye Winston, needs him to profile just one more killer, a vengeful sadist who binds his victim’s legs to his throat, guaranteeing he’ll be slowly strangled as he struggles to break free. As McCaleb starts to collect clues—the unsavory history of the victim, the minatory inscription on his corpse, the painted owl perched above the death scene—his profiler’s instinct catches fire: he senses the handiwork of an avenging angel. But the fire turns to ice as the symbols his avenger chooses to decorate his crime lead McCaleb backward to a single, unexpected source: 17th-century painter Hieronymous Bosch, namesake of his LAPD counterpart Harry, who’s on the trail of a cold-blooded 20th-century sex murderer. Bosch’s style couldn’t be more different from McCaleb’s; where McCaleb uses intuition and psychological insight, Bosch uses legwork and logical inference. He’s carefully crafted a case against David Storey, a jet-set killer who’s sworn to Harry he’ll get away with murder. Demolishing Storey’s alibi, finding the witness Storey tried to bury, and discovering a possible second victim of Storey’s lethal sex games take Bosch within inches of a conviction. But now, as Storey’s trial draws near its close, the credibility of his testimony is imperiled by the growing suspicion against Bosch, and he must confront McCaleb—the physical vs. the metaphysical—or lose his chance to bring a killer to justice.
Bosch fan or McCaleb fan, you can’t lose with this chilling tour-de-force.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-316-15405-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
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
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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