A cowardly assassin’s lust keeps him in constant trouble.
April 1555. While the Catholic Mary sits on the English throne, former cutpurse Jack Blackjack (A Missed Murder, 2018, etc.) is working for John Blount and his friends, who plot to make Elizabeth queen. Although he’s a paid assassin with a nice little house and a servant, Jack spends most of his time dallying with wenches in taverns. Forced into making a small wager by trickster moneylenders, Jack soon sees the amount he owes rise and the threats escalate. He’s distracted by the lovely Cat, whom he meets in a tavern. When he gets her home, her accomplice, Henry, appears and threatens him, but he disarms the pair by telling them that their act will not fool most people. Jack is almost pleased when Coroner Sir Richard of Bath arrives and accuses him of murdering the priest Father Peter in a small village outside London. The priest had a wife and children from the period when King Henry’s religion ruled, but once Mary ascended the throne, the priests were given a choice of renouncing their wives or being expelled from the church. Jack accompanies Sir Richard to the village, where Jack’s old enemy Master Atwood had accused him of the murder, in order to examine the body and find the real killer. By now, the body’s been moved and evidence destroyed by the priest’s widow, who’d followed her husband to his new posting desperate for his help. His refusal forced her to work in the local tavern and share the tavern-keeper’s bed. Father Peter is described alternately as a wonderful man and a priest who took advantage of women. Sir Richard, who admits he’s the priest’s brother, is sure he was an honorable man. Jack is no great thinker, but native cunning and the fear of death move him to investigate the murder for his own sake.
The improbably and delightfully humorous protagonist moves the story to a surprising conclusion.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78029-120-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Creme de la Crime
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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