Evocative, compassionate and compelling.
A crime reporter investigates the murder of her brother, a cabaret nightingale, in Cantrell’s haunting debut novel.
Hannah Vogel regularly scans pictures of the unnamed dead in search of a good story. This time, she stops short when she finds an image of her beloved brother Ernst, naked and abandoned, posted alongside pictures of wretched prostitutes and victims of Nazi mobs. Beautiful, fey Ernst had always been vulnerable to their father’s attempts to make a man of him, and now it’s too late for the authorities to help him or Hannah, who have loaned their identification papers to Sarah and Tobias, radical Jewish friends desperate to emigrate. Unable to bring herself or Ernst to the attention of the police until her friends are safe in New York, Hannah must investigate her brother’s death herself. She begins at the El Dorado, the underground cabaret where Ernst was the star. There she discovers that a dancer has profited from Ernst’s death by becoming the new headliner, and there are rumors that Ernst was flouting his longtime companion by taking a Nazi lover. Hannah’s true shock, however, comes when a grave, malnourished boy appears on her doorstep as she arrives home near dawn, claiming against all odds to be Ernst’s son. Now Hannah must discover both Ernst’s killer and the boy’s true identity as the Sturm Abteilung closes in around them.
Evocative, compassionate and compelling.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2044-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
PROFILES
A high-country Presumed Innocent that moves like greased lightning. First of a welcome new series, though it’s hard to...
Rookie Twelve Sleep County Game Warden Joe Pickett’s not much of a shot, and he’s been looking like a goat ever since poacher Ote Keeley got the drop on him with his own gun during a routine arrest. But at least he’s doing better than Ote, who’s turned up dead on the woodpile outside Joe’s house. Joe’s search in Crazy Woman Creek canyon for the two outfitters and guides Ote was most recently partnered with ends happily, though violently, and suddenly Joe is the man of the hour. Longtime County Sheriff Bud Barnum nervously asks Joe’s assurance that he’s not going to support neighboring game warden Wacey Hedeman’s challenge in the upcoming election; trophy wife Aimee Kensinger, who really likes men in uniforms, invites Joe’s family to housesit her palatial digs for three weeks; and wily Vern Dunnegan, Joe’s predecessor, wants Joe to join him in pulling down big bucks from InterWest resources, the fat-cat corporation for whose gas pipeline Vern’s lining up local support. All this good news is only a front, of course, for a monstrous assault on Joe’s livelihood, his integrity, and his family—and incidentally on an inoffensive species long assumed extinct. In response, Joe promises one of the bad guys that “things are going to get real western,” and that’s exactly what happens in the satisfyingly action-filled climax.
A high-country Presumed Innocent that moves like greased lightning. First of a welcome new series, though it’s hard to imagine tourism-marketing exec Box topping his debut.Pub Date: July 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14748-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
PERSPECTIVES
Middling for this fine series, which automatically makes it one of the season’s highlights.
Fired from his job as Game and Fish Warden after wrapping up his colorful sixth case (In Plain Sight, 2006), Joe Pickett returns to nab the perpetrator of the perfect crime.
According to his own confession, small-time lawyer Clay McCann, feeling bullied and insulted by four campers he encountered in Yellowstone Park, shot them dead. A ingenious technicality he’s discovered, however, prevents him from being tried and convicted. Wyoming Governor Spencer Rulon, a former prosecutor, can only slap McCann’s wrist, but he’s determined to figure out what Rick Hoening, one of the victims, meant by an email that hinted at secrets that could have a major impact on the state’s financial health. So he asks Joe, now working as foreman at his father-in-law’s ranch, to poke around the park while maintaining full deniability for the Governor. The situation stinks, but Joe’s so eager to get away from his wife’s poisonous mother and go back to his old job that he agrees, and in short order there’s a spate of new killings to deal with—some committed by McCann, some not. As usual, there’s little mystery about which of the sketchy suspects is behind the skullduggery. But, as usual, the central situation is so strong, the continuing characters so appealing and the spectacular landscape so lovingly evoked that it doesn’t matter.
Middling for this fine series, which automatically makes it one of the season’s highlights.Pub Date: May 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-399-15427-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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