The big social event of 1321 in England’s West Country is the wedding of Sir Baldwin Furnshill, Keeper of the King’s Peace, to Lady Jeanne. Baldwin (Belladonna at Belstone, p. 340) is preparing for the big event, with the help of his old friend Bailiff Simon Puttock when news arrives from Dartmoor of the death of Roger, the prosperous squire of nearby Throwleigh. At the funeral, Baldwin and Simon meet Roger’s impoverished brother Thomas, heir to the estate. Also in attendance, together with his bodyguard Godfrey, is one James van Relenghes, a handsome Fleming who is paying assiduous attention to the widow. But Baldwin is more troubled by the venomous look he catches her directing at her five-year old son Herbert. Only days later Baldwin gets news of Herbert’s death, supposedly in an accident on the nearby moors. When Baldwin and Simon return to Throwleigh for the second funeral, Baldwin is determined to ferret out the true circumstances of the boy’s death. Covering, in excruciating detail, the whereabouts of everyone on the moor that day—including the manor house domestics Anney and Petronilla, the troubled priest Stephen, and Herbert’s playmates Jordan and Alan—Baldwin turns up some forbidden relationships and eventually a surprising killer.
An inventive plot, memorable characters, steadily absorbing period background.Pub Date: May 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-7472-5952-6
Page Count: 337
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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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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Crime-fighting Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett outdoes himself during a temporary transfer from sleepy Saddlestring to fashionable Jackson Hole.
Will Jensen, the Jackson game warden, was a great guy and a model warden, but once his wife left him six months ago, he spiraled into madness and suicide, and now Joe’s been called to replace him. The transition is anything but smooth. There’s no question of Joe’s family coming with him, so he’s reduced to hoping he can get a signal for the cell-phone calls he squeezes into his busy schedule. En route to his new posting, Joe has to pursue a marauding grizzly. He arrives to meet a formidable series of challenges. Cantankerous outfitter Smoke Van Horn wants to go on attracting elk with illegal salt licks without the new warden’s interference. Animal Liberation Network activist Pi Stevenson wants him to publicize her cause and adopt a vegan diet. Developer Don Ennis wants to open a housing development for millionaires who like their meat free of additives. Ennis’s trophy wife Stella simply wants Joe—and he wants her back. As he wrestles with these demands, and with a supervisor riled over Joe’s track record of destroying government property in pursuit of bad guys (Trophy Hunt, 2004, etc.), Joe slowly becomes convinced that Will did not kill himself.
Joe’s fifth case is his best balanced, most deeply felt and most mystifying to date: an absolute must.Pub Date: May 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15291-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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