A simple case of adultery leads to more fatalities than the Gulf War in Abrahams’s tense, formulaic domestic thriller. Since Beacon Hill art consultant Francie Cullingwood’s old friend Brenda, Countess Vasari, doesn’t leave Rome from year to year for the chillier comforts of her cottage on its own New Hampshire island, it’s only natural that she give Francie the keys so that she can check up on the cottage from time to time—and just as natural for Francie to use it to entertain her friend Dr. Ned Demarco, the bronzed phone-in radio guru of Intimately Yours. All goes well with their weekly trysts until (1) Francie’s husband Roger, fired from his executive-level job despite the stratospheric IQ, catches on to his wife’s dalliance, and (2) Francie realizes that Anne Franklin, the warmly appealing tennis partner with whom she’s making a run at the club championship, is Ned’s wife. Lovable Anne doesn’t suspect a thing, of course, but Roger, with all those unemployed IQ points idling on high, wastes no time in plotting —murder most antiseptic.— Taking the first of several leaves from Dial M for Murder, he decides that the least suspicious way to get rid of Francie is to hire a cat’s paw he can kill himself moments after his unwitting accomplice pulls the trigger. And there’s a perfect candidate waiting in the wings: Whitey Truax, now on parole in Florida after raping and murdering Sue Savard, the wife of the police chief who’ll be investigating the case. Better-read fans than Roger will know, of course, that the choice of Whitey (whose determined stupidity, a savagely comic echo of Roger’s shallow arrogance, is Abrahams’s most original touch) is the last thing that will go right with Roger’s foolproof, but not geniusproof, scheme. One other surefire prediction: With Hard Rain (1987) and The Fan (1995) already turned into Hollywood movies, this property, suitably pruned and tightened, can’t be far behind. (First printing of 100,000)
Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42384-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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