Ivanović’s contributions are from Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, and Finnish writers—all admirably noirish.
Fourteen tales of woe from what Serbian novelist Momo Kapor once called “a low-budget New York.”
Like all Balkan capitals, Belgrade cowers in the shadow of war. In Muharem Bazdulj’s “Black Widow, White Russian,” a Serbian woman who grew up in Sweden enlists the help of a recent divorcé to find the soldier responsible for her father’s death. A Croatian who’s secretly a Serb comes to no good in Miljenko Jergović’s “The Case of Clerk Hinko, a Noose, and Luminal.” The gay heroine of Vladimir Arsenijević’s “Regarding the Father” helps her lover avenge the rape of her mother by war criminals. Vule Žurić shows Partisan and Soviet soldiers sharing the task of excavating the grave of a spy killed by the Nazis in “The Man Who Wasn’t Mars.” Aleksandar Gatalica allows another victim of Nazi brutality to take his revenge via time travel in “The Phantom of the National Theater.” Other stories look forward rather than back in time. The spyware that the IT specialist in Misha Glenny’s “The RAT” installs on a customer’s iPhone thwarts a murder. Goran Skrobonja explores the consequences of a technology that allows people to create a living doppelgänger to take their place when they want to be somewhere else in “Alter Ego Inc.” And some stories are timeless in showing the strange turns that can be taken by the most pedestrian among us, like the chess-playing retirees who discover a sadomasochistic sex business operating out of the cardiologist’s office on the fourth floor of their apartment building in Oto Oltvanji’s “Underneath It All Runs the River of Sadness.”
Ivanović’s contributions are from Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, and Finnish writers—all admirably noirish.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61775-749-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.
An aspiring mystery writer sets out to solve her great-aunt’s murder and inherit an estate.
Twenty-five-year-old Annie Adams has never met her great-aunt Frances, who prefers her small village to busy London. But when a mysterious letter arrives instructing Annie to come to Castle Knoll in Dorset to meet Frances and discuss her role as sole beneficiary of her great-aunt’s estate, Annie can’t resist. Unfortunately, she arrives to find Frances’ worst fears have come true: The elderly woman—who’s been haunted for decades by a fortuneteller’s prediction that this will happen—has been murdered, and her will dictates that she will leave her entire estate to Annie, but only if Annie solves her killing. It’s a cheeky if not exactly believable premise, especially since the local police don’t seem terribly opposed to it. Annie herself is an engaging presence, if a little too blind to the fact that she could be on the killer’s to-do list. Her roll call of suspects is pleasingly long, including but not limited to the local vicar, a one-time paramour of her great-aunt’s; a gardener who grows a lot more than flowers; shady developers and suspicious friends from Frances’ past; and Saxon, Annie’s crafty rival, who inherits the estate himself if he manages to solve the case first. Annie pieces together clues through readings of Frances’ journal, but the story eventually runs aground on the twin rocks of too much explanation and a flimsy climax. Cute dialogue gives way to lengthy exposition, and by the time Frances’ killer is revealed you may well be ready to leave Annie, Dorset, and Castle Knoll behind for the firmer ground of reality. Fans of cozy mysteries are likely to be more forgiving, but if you cast a skeptical eye toward amateur sleuths, this novel won’t change your mind about them.
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593474013
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
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