LOCH OF THE DEAD

Name: LOCH OF THE DEAD
Author: Oscar de Muriel
ISBN: 978-1-64313-010-1

by Oscar de Muriel ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019

Steeped in history, myth, and medical lore, murky as the deepest loch, miles from the remotest civilizing forces, this...

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Inspector Adolphus McGray and his long-suffering lieutenant, Inspector Ian Frey, venture forth from Victorian Edinburgh (A Mask of Shadows, 2018, etc.) to the northern reaches of Scotland to confront all manner of criminal and possibly supernatural atrocities.

Sixteen years after he got his brother’s housekeeper, Millie Fletcher, in the family way and then forced her to give up the baby lest a shadow fall over the lordly Kolomans, Maximilian Koloman has been struck by a deathbed change of heart. He’s begged his relatives to acknowledge Benjamin Smith, who has no idea who his parents are, and to treat him as Maximilian's heir. But not everyone welcomes Benjamin with open arms. Someone’s tossed through Millie’s window a brick with a note reading, “KEEP YOUR BASTARD AWAY OR I SHALL KILL HIM.” Frightened, Millie asks McGray for his help and protection. It’s a lot to ask, but she offers something potentially wonderful in return: a draft from the fabled waters of an island spring in Loch Maree that just might be able to cure McGray’s sister, Pansy, who hacked her parents to death and lopped off her brother’s ring finger, giving him the nickname “Nine-Nails.” Lacking McGray’s motivation for the desolate trip, Frey cheers himself by bringing along his uncle, Maurice Plantard, whose instantaneous mutual antagonism with McGray threatens to overwhelm the criminal plot. And that’s a lot to overwhelm, for even as the characters are congratulating themselves that no one’s been killed, Benjamin’s longtime guardian is murdered, and others will follow. Juniper Island, home to that healing spring, is also host to the Nellys family, whose head may have been miraculously cured already, and perhaps a flock of vampire bats as well. In fact, the horrors that swirl around the Koloman family escalate so dramatically that eventually a magnanimous criminal tells a prospective target: “I’ll be kind to you. You shall be the first victim, so that you won’t have to witness all of tonight’s unavoidable gore.” Talk about kind.

Steeped in history, myth, and medical lore, murky as the deepest loch, miles from the remotest civilizing forces, this provides all the thrills of an amusement-park concession for grown-ups who want to test their limits.

Pub Date: April 2, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-64313-010-1

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Pegasus Crime

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

- BOOK REVIEW
A FEVER OF THE BLOOD
by Oscar de Muriel

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THE STRINGS OF MURDER
by Oscar de Muriel

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
TWO NIGHTS
by Kathy Reichs

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THE WINNER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997

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Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)