Kasasian’s debut is an unflinching look at the darker side of Victorian London and a portrait of a heroine strong enough to...
A Victorian detective solves a mystery but meets his match in his independent-minded young ward.
Although March Middleton, the orphaned daughter of an army doctor, had an unconventional upbringing, she’s still not quite prepared for a new life in London with her godfather and guardian, renowned detective Sidney Grice. Vain, arrogant and dapper, with a glass eye and a sardonic tongue, Grice has little use for Mrs. Grace Dillinger, a prospective client who can’t afford his fees. When she pleads on behalf of her son-in-law William Ashby, an ironmonger accused of stabbing his wife to death, March offers to foot the bill if she’s allowed to accompany Grice in his investigation. The unlikely duo explore the back alleys of London, examine corpses and blood spatter, interview an Italian opera singer, and evaluate the result of a recently developed blood test that proves to Grice’s and a jury’s satisfaction that Ashby is guilty. When a missing knife and a recovered wig suggest that Grice is wrong, he pursues the case even more relentlessly. He triumphs, but March still gets the better of him: the biggest satisfaction in a tale rich in gory detail and glass-eyeball gags.
Kasasian’s debut is an unflinching look at the darker side of Victorian London and a portrait of a heroine strong enough to stand up to a thoroughly disagreeable detective. Clever plotting, morbid humor and colorful characters are a greater treat for the mind than the heart—or the stomach.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60598-539-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
So fierce, ambitious, and far-reaching that it makes most other mysteries seem like so many petit fours.
V.I. Warshawski’s search for a homeless woman with a fraught past leads her deep into a series of political conspiracies that stretch over generations and continents.
Bernadine Fouchard, V.I.’s goddaughter, thinks that Lydia Zamir, whose songs about strong women she reveres, was shot dead along with her lover, Hector Palurdo, at a Kansas fundraiser four years ago. She’s only half right. The 17 victims ranch hand Arthur Morton shot in Horsethief Canyon include Palurdo but not Zamir, whom V.I. and Bernie happen to hear banging out haunting tunes on a toy piano under a Chicago railroad viaduct. But they glimpse her only momentarily before the traumatized musician flees and eventually disappears. Soon afterward, Bernie finds herself in trouble when the young man she’s been dating—Leo Prinz, a summer employee of SLICK, the South Lakefront Improvement Council—is murdered and she becomes a person of considerable interest to Sgt. Lenora Pizzello. The search for Lydia Zamir morphs into an investigation of her relationship with Palurdo, an activist against the Pinochet regime in Chile long before he was shot apparently at random. In the meantime, the disappearance of Simon Lensky, one of SLICK’s elected managers, throws a spotlight on the organization’s controversial proposal for a new landfill on the South Side. Everyone in the city seems to have strong opinions about the proposal, from Gifford Taggett, superintendent of the Chicago Park District, to Nobel Prize–winning economist Larry Nieland, to an inveterate protestor known only as Coop, who kicks off the story by vanishing after parking his dog with V.I., to her consternation and the ire of her neighbors and her own two dogs. As usual, Paretsky (Shell Game, 2018, etc.) is less interested in identifying whodunit than in uncovering a monstrous web of evil, and this web is one of her densest and most finely woven ever.
So fierce, ambitious, and far-reaching that it makes most other mysteries seem like so many petit fours.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-243592-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
With its shaky armchair psychology and excessive plot threads, this is a series low point.
A teenager with a troubled past becomes the prime suspect in a string of brutal murders, but ex–FBI profiler Pierce Quincy and his partner, Rainie Conner, think there’s more to the story.
For the past three years, Pierce and Rainie have fostered Sharlah Nash, now 13, with the hope of soon adopting her. Sharlah’s childhood is the epitome of troubled: when she was 5, her drug-addict father killed her mother and then tried to kill her and her older brother, Telly, but Telly, then 9, bashed his head in with a baseball bat. The siblings were fostered apart, with Sharlah ending up with Pierce and Rainie, whose expertise as parents seems to come from their combined resumes as a former criminal profiler and cop, respectively. Telly, we learn in expansive flashbacks from the now-teenager’s point of view (Sharlah has her own, crowding an already packed narrative), bounced around before landing, age 17, with Frank and Sandra Duvall, a kind couple who are obviously not what they seem. In what appears to be an explosion of unexplained rage, Telly allegedly murders the Duvalls and then kills two people in a gas station before heading off into the Oregon woods, sparking a manhunt and fears that he’s coming after Sharlah. Pierce and Rainie (last seen in Say Goodbye, 2008) work with local law enforcement to build a psychological profile of the teen—which is questionable given the excessive amount of guesswork and second- and thirdhand information used—while trying to protect their daughter from harm.
With its shaky armchair psychology and excessive plot threads, this is a series low point.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-525-95458-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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