Despite occasionally overworked jokes and a disappointingly abrupt ending, Kasasian (The Curse of the House of Foskett,...
Victorian detective Sidney Grice takes on a new client: his own young ward.
March Middleton believes she has no family. Her mother died at March’s birth, and her father was recently murdered. He left March in the care of her godfather, Sidney Grice, who gives her a home but never stops ridiculing her inferior intelligence, her plainness, and her cigarette-sneaking, gin-sipping ways. Even so, March isn’t altogether unhappy with Mr. G, and together they’ve solved some unusual cases. While he’s investigating a murder in Yorkshire, she’s as pleased as she is surprised by a letter from Ptolemy Travers Smyth, who claims to be her cousin and invites her to dinner at his home, Saturn Villa. As a reference, he offers Inspector George Pound, whose ring March secretly wears next to her heart. But Pound’s recovering from a stab wound, and rather than trouble him, March trustingly heads out alone to the villa to meet Smyth, who begs that March call him Uncle Tolly and stay overnight. He also hints that Grice plans to kill her. Before March can find out why, Tolly dies horribly, and March, unaccountably ill and hallucinating badly, isn’t sure she didn’t kill him. Tolly’s valet summons the police, and only the trifling fact that Tolly isn’t really dead clears March’s name—until a series of actual murders puts her in as much peril as her mysteriously altered mental state. Her guardian uses such clues as wax, dust, a woodlouse, a couple of eyelashes, and a pickled puppy’s head to link the recent deaths to disturbing events from March’s past. But can even Grice’s keen intellect and perceptiveness about everything but his own foibles save March from the gallows?
Despite occasionally overworked jokes and a disappointingly abrupt ending, Kasasian (The Curse of the House of Foskett, 2015, etc.) surpasses Grice’s first two cases with a bizarre, clever, and constantly surprising whodunit.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60598-971-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dozens of twists and a couple of first-class shocks, but it all trails off like an endless fireworks display that keeps...
Lincoln Rhyme, the quadriplegic criminalist who recently knocked 'em dead at the bijou (The Bone Collector, 1997), is back, sweating to rescue a pair of kidnapped Tarheelers from the insect-loving kid who's snatched them.
Lured to North Carolina by the promise of some experimental surgery that might allow him to move more than his head and a single finger, Rhyme is on hand, along with his protégé Amelia Sachs, when Sheriff Jim Bell gets the news that Garrett Hanlon, the troubled teenager who already killed fellow-student Billy Stail and dragged Mary Beth McConnell off to the back of beyond, has returned to abduct nurse Lydia Johansson as well. Analyzing the scanty trace evidence with all his usual rigor, Rhyme, using Sachs as his eyes and nose at the crime scene, dopes out where the Insect Boy must be taking his victims, and Sachs, joined by Bell's deputies, races a trio of moronic moonshiners bent on a reward Mary Beth's mother has offered to catch up with Hanlon first. The case would be closed if this were anybody but devious Deaver. But the arrest is only his cue to turn up the heat, as Rhyme and Sachs duke it out over Hanlon's guilt, and their conflict leaves Sachs on the run with Hanlon in custody, or vice versa. As former allies turn against each other, Deaver shows loyalties dissolving and reforming in record time. But the effect of this double-time quadrille is more ingenious than illuminating; Rhyme's forensic work is more dogged than gripping; and the galaxy of junior-league threats who take the place of Deaver's usual sociopathic monsters (The Devil's Teardrop, 1999, etc.) are no more threatening than a cloud of pesky mosquitoes.
Dozens of twists and a couple of first-class shocks, but it all trails off like an endless fireworks display that keeps exploding into bangs and blossoms even after you've started to look for your car. (Literary Guild/Mystery Guild Main Selection.)Pub Date: May 9, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-85563-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
Hollywood homicide dick Harry Bosch goes up against whoever killed high-rolling, lowlife filmmaker Tony Aliso and tipped his body into the trunk of his Rolls. The early buzz on the case shouts Las Vegas—so Harry heads out there in hopes of tracking down Tony's latest companion, a stripper named Layla. Instead he finds a trail of evidence that links Tony to a money-laundering operation for Joey Marks, the outfit's top man in Vegas; to Dolly's, a strip club owned by Marks lieutenant Luke ("Lucky") Goshen; and to Eleanor Wish, an ex-FBI agent whose activities took her to Harry's bed and a stretch in the pen before she turned up on video playing poker at Tony's side. Tough-guy Harry (The Last Coyote, 1995, etc.), incredibly still carrying a torch for Eleanor, wastes no time rekindling their affair—Eleanor's sullenness cracks just long enough for some brisk sex—and then finds he has to cut all sorts of deals with the Vegas cops and his own department to keep her out of the case he's building against Lucky Goshen. Back in L.A., deeper trouble awaits: When Harry lays out the case against Goshen—motive, fingerprints, murder weapon—he's told that Goshen's an undercover FBI agent with an ironclad alibi and that he's dashed into the middle of a sting that's been years in the making. Relieved once again of his homicide assignment, Harry—together with trusty sidekicks Jerry Edgar and Kiz Rider—goes up against Tony's killers himself, with results as gripping and satisfying as they are improbable. Forget realism, okay? If you'd like to see a buried love affair take off like a rocket and a bunch of crooks and crooked cops as canny and treacherous as le Carres spies, you've come to the right place.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-316-15244-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1996
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
