A welcome return for Brendy McCusker, the rent-a-cop who used to work for the Ulster Constabulary, and DI Lily O’Carroll, who still does.
Louis Bloom went to take out a bag of trash five minutes before the 9 PM television screening of The Fall and never returned. Normally his disappearance wouldn’t be investigated for two days, but his wife, Elizabeth, is the sister of Angela Larkin, whose husband is Superintendent Niall Larkin of the Ulster Royal Constabulary—or the Police Service of Northern Ireland, as it’s now called. So Lily and McCusker both get rousted from their beds in the dead of night to question the newly distressed wife and begin preliminary investigations. These quickly lead to a simple explanation of why Louis Bloom never came home: He’s lying stabbed to death in the nearby Friar’s Bush graveyard. Who would have wanted to kill an inoffensive lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast whose specialization was “The Politics of Love”? Maybe Al Armstrong, the platonic but exceedingly close friend Elizabeth asks to come over even before Lily and McCusker arrive. Maybe Bloom’s own friend Mariana Fitzgerald, a former escort who proves, along with her friend Murcia Woyda, that marrying one of your wealthy clients and retiring from the escort game is no guarantee of happily ever after. Maybe his administrative assistant, the whimsically named Leab David, who’s clearly having an affair with another of his colleagues at QUB. In the end, though, whodunit matters less than the many individual scenes Charles (One of Our Jeans Is Missing, 2016, etc.) crafts with such a careful eye on the sparks that can fly—some of them charming, some witty, some downright menacing—between characters who don’t happen to see eye to eye, or sometimes even to be operating in the same galaxy.
Once again, it’s hard to resist a hero who realizes, “He just had a habit of opening his mouth and not knowing what was going to come out.”Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8023-1362-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | POLICE PROCEDURALS
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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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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The racism, classism, and sexism of 50 years ago wrapped up in a stylish, sexy, suspenseful period drama about a newsroom...
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Baltimore in the 1960s is the setting for this historical fiction about a real-life unsolved drowning.
In her most ambitious work to date, Lippman (Sunburn, 2018, etc.) tells the story of Maddie Schwartz, an attractive 37-year-old Jewish housewife who abruptly leaves her husband and son to pursue a long-held ambition to be a journalist, and Cleo Sherwood, an African-American cocktail waitress about whom little is known. Sherwood's body was found in a lake in a city park months after she disappeared, and while no one else seems to care enough to investigate, Maddie becomes obsessed—partly due to certain similarities she perceives between her life and Cleo's, partly due to her faith in her own detective skills. The story unfolds from Maddie's point of view as well as that of Cleo's ghost, who seems to be watching from behind the scenes, commenting acerbically on Maddie's nosing around like a bull in a china shop after getting a job at one of the city papers. Added to these are a chorus of Baltimore characters who make vivid one-time appearances: a jewelry store clerk, an about-to-be-murdered schoolgirl, "Mr. Helpline," a bartender, a political operative, a waitress, a Baltimore Oriole, the first African-American female policewoman (these last two are based on real people), and many more. Maddie's ambition propels her forward despite the cost to others, including the family of the deceased and her own secret lover, a black policeman. Lippman's high-def depiction of 1960s Baltimore and the atmosphere of the newsroom at that time—she interviewed associates of her father, Baltimore Sun journalist Theo Lippman Jr., for the details—ground the book in fascinating historical fact.The literary gambit she balances atop that foundation—the collage of voices—works impressively, showcasing the author's gift for rhythms of speech. The story is bigger than the crime, and the crime is bigger than its solution, making Lippman's skill as a mystery novelist work as icing on the cake.
The racism, classism, and sexism of 50 years ago wrapped up in a stylish, sexy, suspenseful period drama about a newsroom and the city it covers.Pub Date: July 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-239001-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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