This 27th meandering cozy from Brown and her feline co-author (Tall Tail, 2016, etc.) is cluttered with too many characters...
Two modern murders with ties to the 18th century excite the interest of a Virginian busybody and her animal friends, though perhaps not many others.
First, Mary Minor “Harry” Haristeen’s beloved pets—cats Mrs. Murphy and Pewter, along with their much maligned corgi companion, Tee Tucker—are on the prowl near their farm in Crozet when they see an eagle flying overhead with a strip of skin and a human eyeball dangling from its talons. Next up is Deputy Cynthia Cooper, who responds to a call about a running transport vehicle with the keys still in the ignition. The missing driver turns up dead and wedged beneath a rock, with half his face torn off and no eye. Then the Waldingfield Beagles, a pack of hunting dogs on a horseless, kill-free hunt, find the body of an African-American investigator with an 18th-century brass chit—a slave pass from one of the area’s former plantation owners, Ewing Garth. As the narrative alternates between the earlier century, including Garth, his family, his “people” (delicacy prevents the Garths from calling them slaves), and his neighbors, and the 20th-century citizens of Albermarle County, more questions arise about what the late private eye was investigating, who robbed a high-end shop of Native American artifacts, who disturbed the graves of an 18th-century couple, and who’s taking potshots at the ever curious Harry. The plot inches forward amid debates about currency in the 18th century and modern lessons about Virginia history and discussions of golf, along with commentary from Mrs. Murphy and friends. A couple of tacked-on resolutions will provide small satisfaction to genre fans.
This 27th meandering cozy from Brown and her feline co-author (Tall Tail, 2016, etc.) is cluttered with too many characters too sketchily drawn. Loyal fans may be chagrined to see the franchise menagerie reduced to little more than a furry Greek chorus.Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-39249-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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