An entertaining whodunit with a captivating amateur sleuth.
Music and murder lead a 35-year-old doctoral aspirant through a midlife crisis in this mystery series opener.
Larkin Day has left Los Angeles, broke and discouraged, and taken up “temporary” residence in her mother’s guest room in Pratincola, Iowa, a small town outside Cedar Rapids. Floundering in her attempt to finish her dissertation on Chekhov, and unable to secure a job in her chosen field of theater—or any position that will pay her bills—she is taking a break to reevaluate her life. Her mom, Dr. Josephine Day, a college dean, thinks she has found just the right thing to combat Larkin’s ennui. Josephine has arranged with choral director Ed Jackson to add Larkin to the local chorus for an upcoming presentation of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony performed by singers and musicians from the Cedar Rapids to Iowa City corridor (the “Corridorchestra”). Less than impressed with this parental suggestion, Larkin nonetheless finds herself attending that evening’s rehearsal. A week later, at the first rehearsal of the entire “megachoir,” piano accompanist Harrison Tucker does not return after the 10-minute recess. As the rehearsal drones on with alto Anni Morgan filling in for the pianist, Larkin leaves early—and discovers Harrison’s crumpled body lying just outside the stage door. And now Dieker’s novel begins to kick into high gear. Beethoven’s Ninth is the ever present musical backdrop to the mystery and is the focus of an engaging—albeit overly detailed—tutorial on the subtle intricacies of the composer’s lengthiest piece, which builds meticulously to its famous “Ode to Joy” conclusion. Larkin, who trained as a theatrical director, views everything through that unique perspective. Despite her millennial angst, she is an amusing and edgy observer of body language as well as the minutiae of rehearsal procedures (“Ben the baritone was the first to sing, Beethoven’s familiar melody filling the auditorium as the megachoir echoed his claim that Freud should get funky, or whatever Freude, schöner Götterfunken meant”). Together with Anni, an intriguing, socially awkward counterbalance to her own more combative nature, Larkin begins to investigate Harrison’s death, convinced he was murdered. Well-scripted dialogue, engaging banter, and a diverse cast keep the light mystery moving at a good clip.
An entertaining whodunit with a captivating amateur sleuth.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73369-195-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Shortwave Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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