An imperfect but highly readable mystery built around a man in a coma.
A priest tries to discover the reason for a firefighter’s suicide attempt in this novel.
After 11 years in the priesthood, Father Jamie Bluterre still hasn’t found his calling. Attached to New York’s Our Lady of Sorrows Parish, he considers this assignment his last opportunity to prove he deserves to wear his collar. He has been ordered by his superior to receive the confession of 55-year-old firefighter Sean “Duke” Ducotty, who lies comatose in a hospital with a bullet lodged in his brain from an attempted suicide. Doctors assume Duke is brain dead, but he can actually hear everything that goes on around him, trapped like a prisoner in his own body. He is also visited by visions of Valerie Dunn, his feisty former lover. Father Blu seeks to uncover the cause of Duke’s suicide attempt and, thereby, hopefully, to save the man’s soul. “I want to understand—the church wants to understand—if he was fully responsible or even responsible at all for his action,” he explains to Duke’s former battalion chief. “What was his state of mind when he did this?” Meanwhile, Duke relives the events that led to the fateful act, scouring them for meaning. The two haunted men, one sleeping, one awake, seek to unravel the mystery of Duke and Valerie, a series of arsons, and the musical clues that the firefighter lay scattered behind him. Lengsfelder’s prose is moody and dreamlike, particularly Duke’s comatose ruminations: “In those drugged hours, Val came, half woman half moth; great ochre wings challenging the emptiness, with the grace of a flame and the will of a raptor, dragging me back into the light, into the fluorescent hospital room with the bleached shapes, that once again became doctors circling me.” The novel unfolds slowly, and while the premise is wonderfully evocative, readers will quickly get the sense that the author is struggling to make Duke more compelling and mysterious than he actually is. There’s only so much romance that can be squeezed from the lives of these aging New Yorkers, many of whom seem to chafe under the noirish framing. Even so, the book is often compelling, and Father Blu is an oddly dynamic and vulnerable detective as he tries to salvage Duke’s soul—and his own.
An imperfect but highly readable mystery built around a man in a coma.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 417
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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
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