On the long side but so fast-paced you won’t care: another absorbing, resourceful English procedural from one of the best.
Sent to look into an accident involving two fellow officers from the Avon and Somerset Police, DS Peter Diamond finds himself improbably but compellingly on the trail of an unusually cold-blooded serial killer.
Georgina Dallymore, the boss whom Diamond’s recently been closer with than he’d wanted (Down Among the Dead Men, 2015), wants her star investigator to exonerate Lew Morgan and Aaron Green, the two uniformed officers who’d crashed their patrol car in an effort to avoid hitting Ivor Pellegrini, an old man on a homemade tricycle who now lies in a coma at the Royal United Hospital. It’s too late to question Green, who was killed in the crash, and Morgan didn’t see enough to settle things. But that mostly turns out to be beside the point, because Diamond, who was responsible for spotting Pellegrini hours after the accident, giving him life-saving CPR, and sending him to the hospital, is soon pursuing an altogether different case. People close to Pellegrini have been dying, apparently of natural causes, at an alarming rate in recent months. The dead, all connected to the Great Western Railway Society, of which Pellegrini has been a mainstay, include Massimo Filiput, his old friend Cyril Hardstaff, Cyril’s wife, Winnie, and perhaps others. Who would take the trouble to kill so many inoffensive old people, and how, and why? It’s only after getting tricked into swallowing a red herring deeply laid by the killer, who duly notes the triumph in an encrypted journal, that Diamond eventually identifies his quarry, a deceptively minor character who turns out to be a good deal more major than he’d suspected.
On the long side but so fast-paced you won’t care: another absorbing, resourceful English procedural from one of the best.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61695-758-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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