Thoroughly enjoyable, if less exciting than The Last Hours. Read them both, and in order.
Survivors of the Black Death’s terror search for safety in this sequel to The Last Hours (2018).
In 1348, while pustules and agonizing death plague the rest of the English countryside, Lady Anne has the good sense to wall off Develish and surround it with a moat. So no one there dies from the plague, but they can’t survive indefinitely in isolation. “Milady” has backup from Thaddeus Thurkell, a strong, intelligent, and courageous serf. Readers of the first novel will know many of the details already because the two books are one tightly woven story. For example, Sir Richard, Anne’s late and unlamented husband, not only impregnated their daughter, Eleanor, but carelessly helped spread the plague (the dirty rat!). Most have no clue of the plague’s cause. The official answer of church and royalty is that God really, really hates sinners—apparently even those whose infractions are trivial or imagined—so He inflicts a pestilence that could “[rob] all England of its peasant class.” Of course it afflicts nobles as well, because “the pestilence makes equals of us all.” But Milady sees the problem as not wrath but rats, hence the wall and moat. She conspires with Thurkell for him to go away and return as My Lord of Athelstan so he’ll be better able to protect her people. Then he must safely lead everyone from the village through a countryside laid low by disease. They face strong opposition from enemies such as Master de Courtesmain, who thinks Thurkell a “harlot-hatched bastard” as well as a thief and murderer. Courtesmain also correctly accuses Milady and Thurkell of conspiring to let the serfs of Develish buy themselves out of bondage. Thurkell’s bravery complements Lady Anne’s use of “kindness and reason to quell the anger in men’s hearts.” We should be “loved and honored for who we are,” Lady Anne writes. Yes indeed.
Thoroughly enjoyable, if less exciting than The Last Hours. Read them both, and in order.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7783-0883-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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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