Fans of bookish European fiction will enjoy this, the too abundant Dan Brown–ian motions notwithstanding.
Who was that Cowled Man? Austrian novelist Pötzsch serves up an ambitious though familiar tale of Mad King Ludwig.
Clues tucked away in old books, secret societies (cowled, naturally, the better to hide) seeking to keep the secrets in those musty pages safe from prying eyes, history hinging on the occult—it’s well-worked territory. That said, Pötzsch (The Beggar King, 2013) will endear himself to independent booksellers everywhere by making the hero of the piece one of their kind (“[h]ours of dealing with damaged books had hit him harder than he liked to admit”), if one unusually full of lethal surprises (“[t]he king would never have believed the bookseller capable of killing one of the strongest knights in cold blood”). At his side stands Sara Lengfeld, ace art detective—“Art detective? More like a female Philip Marlowe,” thinks Steven, antiquarian bookseller, appreciatively. How a secret diary has come into Steven’s hands is one of many implausibilities in a story that begs and begs again the suspension of disbelief, but no matter: Anyone who’s visited Bavaria and toured the great Neuschwanstein Castle will have wondered why Ludwig II, the brilliant and eccentric ruler of that formerly independent state, wound up deposed and dead under very strange circumstances, and Pötzsch offers an intriguing, entertaining answer. Moreover, his novel includes a virtual book-within-book tour of Ludwig’s two palaces, along with that castle, in which clues unfold at a brisk pace. The writing is occasionally clunky (“His headache the next morning told Steven that the Montepulciano had been a bit stronger than he was used to”; “[t]he ramshackle horse-drawn cab tossed Steven roughly back and forth”), but the tale moves along well enough, and it resolves nicely.
Fans of bookish European fiction will enjoy this, the too abundant Dan Brown–ian motions notwithstanding.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-74010-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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