An intriguing but overly detailed story of avarice and crime.
In his debut mystery, Grant mines a culture of retirees living the good life on an isolated island in southwest Florida.
The novel opens in the village of Saint James City on tiny Pine Island near Florida’s western coast. This is no Margaritaville; in fact, the average age is well north of 60. There are no beaches here, and most people are out of the restaurants and bars and into their beds by 11 p.m. The narrator is retired banker Jim Story, who’s happily married to retired banker Jill. Between their infrequent travels and visits to grandchildren, they enjoy a relaxed lifestyle of seafood dinners, afternoon cocktails with friends and lots of fishing. However, their peaceful existence is disturbed when one of Story’s former banking colleagues, Javier Hernandez, comes to visit, goes fishing on a boat and is later found dead—shot between the eyes. It turns out that Javier was a descendant of a former Spanish police officer who served in Cuba in the early 20th century, and his inexplicable murder sets Story on a quest to find connections between American political and financial interests in Cuba, a century-old war crime, Spanish peacekeepers and a cache of gold. As he digs deeper into the histories of wealthy and powerful figures, however, he makes dangerous enemies. The Storys eventually enlist the help of a retired military officer, Steve Fairchild, and his wife in identifying and hunting down the killer. All ends well back in St. James City, and the residents drink and dance in celebration of a crime solved. However, the novel’s pace is as leisurely as a group of seniors after midnight; the plot meanders through detours and side roads and, as a result, loses steam along the way. It devotes many pages to tangential topics, such as an involved description of Salamanca, Spain; techniques for trimming palm trees; and the different flavors of Vienna sausages. Some of these deviations add color and context, but the dilatory pace and lackadaisical point of view reduce the impact of a story set in motion by a shocking murder.
An intriguing but overly detailed story of avarice and crime.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484847985
Page Count: 432
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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