Very smart, with a tight plot and richer-than-average characterizations.
A coroner in small-town England struggles against the police, elements of the government and her own demons to find out what happened to two suspected radicals.
Jenny Cooper, the fraught protagonist of Hall’s debut (The Coroner, 2008, U.K. only), is once again trying to solve a case that powerful, interested parties would just as soon keep unsolved. This time, though, she’s quit drinking, and the only pills she takes are the ones her psychiatrist prescribes to keep her anxiety at bay. Mrs. Jamal, a distraught mother almost unhinged by grief, turns to Jenny as a last resort, desperate to learn what happened to her son Nazim and his friend Rafi, who disappeared seven years ago. The authorities seem sure the young men went abroad to join extremists in Pakistan or Afghanistan, but she’s sure they didn’t, despite their involvement with a radical Islamic group. Jenny’s decision to convene an inquest is met with a marked lack of cooperation by the police and MI5, who for unknown reasons would rather the whole thing go away. But whenever she is tempted to let things slide, she’s urged on by Alec MacAvoy, a disgraced and amoral but charming and charismatic former lawyer in pursuit of his own shrouded agenda. Jenny’s burgeoning feelings for Alec threaten to upset the delicate emotional balance she’s created as she struggles to get over a divorce, get along with her teenage son and get to the bottom of the ever-darkening mystery surrounding Nazim and Rafi’s disappearance. Stubborn but fragile, dedicated to her work but always unsure as to whether she has the mettle to seek out the truth when everyone around her seems dead set on keeping it hidden, Jenny is a complex, compelling heroine. Hall does a stellar job of eliciting our empathy for her struggles with her job, her emotions, her addictions and her anxieties.
Very smart, with a tight plot and richer-than-average characterizations.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5698-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
A treat for aficionados of shopkeeper-sleuth cozies.
Notch another corpse for Jacobia “Jake” Tiptree (Death by Chocolate Malted Milkshake, 2019, etc.).
After slowly working its way out of the red, Jake’s sweet shop is now one of the linchpins of the revitalized business district of Eastport, Maine. But she and her partner, Ellie White, are less than thrilled when Henry Hadlyme, star of the food tourism show Eat This! offers to include The Chocolate Moose on his podcast Eating on the Edge! which highlights off-the-beaten-track purveyors of New England fare. Hadlyme seems a little slimy to Jake and Ellie, and his interest in their treats seems less than sincere. But when he calls Jake “missy,” that’s it; the two chocolateers boot him out of their shop. He comes back with a vengeance—or at least, his corpse does. It turns up in the basement of the Moose with a stuffed parrot pinned to its shoulder and a cutlass jabbed through its chest in a gruesome nod to the ongoing Eastport Pirate Festival. Jake would love to present police chief Bob Arnold with a convenient alternative to charging her with Hadlyme’s murder. And there’s no dearth of suspects: A surreptitious trip to the Eat This! production trailer lets Jake know that pretty much everyone involved with the show hated Hadlyme. But finding out exactly who croaked the curmudgeon—and offering the chief some proof—proves to be a challenge to Jake’s and Ellie’s ingenuity, health, and welfare.
A treat for aficionados of shopkeeper-sleuth cozies.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1134-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An expert juggling act that ends with not one but two intercut trials. More, please.
His Clifton Chronicles (This Was a Man, 2017, etc.) complete, the indefatigable Archer launches a new series that follows a well-born police officer from his first assignment to (spoiler alert) his appointment as commissioner of the Metropolitan Police some volumes down the road.
William Warwick may have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he’s done everything he can to declare his independence from his father, Sir Julian Warwick QC. When William, fresh out of King’s College with a degree in art history, announces his intention to enroll in Hendon Police College, his father realizes that he’ll have to count on William’s older sister, Grace, to carry on the family’s tradition in Her Majesty’s courts. Instead, guileless William patrols the streets of Lambeth until a chance remark lands him on DCI Bruce Lamont’s Art and Antiques unit under the watchful eye of Cmdr. Jack Hawksby. No fewer than four cases await his attention: the forger who signs first editions with the names of their famous authors; a series of even more accomplished forgeries of old masters paintings; a well-organized series of thefts of artworks by a gang whose leader prefers selling them back to the companies who’ve insured them and often don’t even report the thefts to the police; and a mysterious series of purchases of century-old silver by one Kevin Carter. His investigations take William across the path, and then into the bed, of Beth Rainsford, a research assistant at the Fitzmolean gallery, still reeling seven years after a priceless Rembrandt was stolen from its collection, most likely by landowner and self-styled farmer Miles Faulkner. As if to prevent William from getting even a moment’s sleep in between rounds of detection and decorous coupling, Beth unwillingly drags William into a fifth case, a 2-year-old murder whose verdict she has every reason to doubt. One of these cases will bring William up against Grace, whose withering cross-examination of him on the witness stand is a special highlight.
An expert juggling act that ends with not one but two intercut trials. More, please.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-20076-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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