The results are professional, even exhaustive, but uninspired, with the unmasking of the nondescript culprit a particular...
Detective Tracy Crosswhite goes after the killer who’s hogtying Seattle’s exotic dancers and watching them strangle themselves to death.
Still raw from the retrial of the leading suspect in her long-dead sister Sarah’s murder back in Cedar Grove (My Sister’s Grave, 2014), Tracy has rejoined the Violent Crime Squad just in time to catch the case of Angela Schreiber, a dancer at the Pink Palace who was strangled in a hotel room she’d rented by the hour. The scene bears an uncomfortable similarity to the death scene of Nicole Hansen, a performer at Dancing Bare, whose case Tracy’s boss, Capt. Johnny Nolasco, had taken from her and palmed off on Cold Cases after only a month. Tracy, who’s just received a noose from an anonymous donor, soon realizes that both cases also recall the murder of Beth Stinson, a bookkeeper who was strangled with a noose nine years ago in her North Seattle home. Clearly the Violent Crime Squad is up against a serial killer. None of them wants to use that phrase to the press because of the hysteria it would incite—except for Nolasco, who repeatedly leaks inside information to TV reporter Maria Vanpelt, dubs the perp the Cowboy Killer, and does everything he can to whip up public frenzy and undermine Tracy. Dugoni pulls out all the stops. He parades a lineup of suspects that includes a rancher’s son, a fly-tying expert, and a man who likes to wear cowboy boots. He has Tracy go off on an unauthorized investigation with her lover, lawyer Dan O’Leary. He shows the Cowboy Killer striking again and again. He puts Tracy squarely in the danger zone so that the only question is whether she’ll be drummed off the force before she’s strangled herself.
The results are professional, even exhaustive, but uninspired, with the unmasking of the nondescript culprit a particular letdown. It all reads like an expansive anthology of genre scenes you’ve encountered a hundred times before.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5039-4502-9
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Fans who still mourn the passing of Agatha Christie, the model who’s evoked here in dozens of telltale details, will welcome...
A preternaturally brainy novel within a novel that’s both a pastiche and a deconstruction of golden-age whodunits.
Magpie Murders, bestselling author Alan Conway’s ninth novel about Greek/German detective Atticus Pünd, kicks off with the funeral of Mary Elizabeth Blakiston, devoted housekeeper to Sir Magnus Pye, who’s been found at the bottom of a steep staircase she’d been vacuuming in Pye Hall, whose every external door was locked from the inside. Her demise has all the signs of an accident until Sir Magnus himself follows her in death, beheaded with a sword customarily displayed with a full suit of armor in Pye Hall. Conway's editor, Susan Ryeland, does her methodical best to figure out which of many guilty secrets Conway has provided the suspects in Saxby-on-Avon—Rev. Robin Osborne and his wife, Henrietta; Mary’s son, Robert, and his fiancee, Joy Sanderling; Joy’s boss, surgeon Emilia Redwing, and her elderly father; antiques dealers Johnny and Gemma Whitehead; Magnus’ twin sister, Clarissa; and Lady Frances Pye and her inevitable lover, investor Jack Dartford—is most likely to conceal a killer, but she’s still undecided when she comes to the end of the manuscript and realizes the last chapter is missing. Since Conway in inconveniently unavailable, Susan, in the second half of the book, attempts to solve the case herself, questioning Conway’s own associates—his sister, Claire; his ex-wife, Melissa; his ex-lover, James Taylor; his neighbor, hedge fund manager John White—and slowly comes to the realization that Conway has cast virtually all of them as fictional avatars in Magpie Murders and that the novel, and indeed Conway’s entire fictional oeuvre, is filled with a mind-boggling variety of games whose solutions cast new light on murders fictional and nonfictional.
Fans who still mourn the passing of Agatha Christie, the model who’s evoked here in dozens of telltale details, will welcome this wildly inventive homage/update/commentary as the most fiendishly clever puzzle—make that two puzzles—of the year.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-264522-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
The parts with Nero Wolfe, the only character Goldsborough brings to life, are almost worth waiting for.
In Archie Goodwin's 15th adventure since the death of his creator, Rex Stout, his gossipy Aunt Edna Wainwright lures him from 34th Street to his carefully unnamed hometown in Ohio to investigate the death of a well-hated bank president.
Tom Blankenship, the local police chief, thinks there’s no case since Logan Mulgrew shot himself. But Archie’s mother, Marjorie Goodwin, and Aunt Edna know lots of people with reason to have killed him. Mulgrew drove rival banker Charles Purcell out of business, forcing Purcell to get work as an auto mechanic, and foreclosed on dairy farmer Harold Mapes’ spread. Lester Newman is convinced that Mulgrew murdered his ailing wife, Lester’s sister, so that he could romance her nurse, Carrie Yeager. And Donna Newman, Lester’s granddaughter, might have had an eye on her great-uncle’s substantial estate. Nor is Archie limited to mulling over his relatives’ gossip, for Trumpet reporter Verna Kay Padgett, whose apartment window was shot out the night her column raised questions about the alleged suicide, is perfectly willing to publish a floridly actionable summary of the leading suspects that delights her editor, shocks Archie, and infuriates everyone else. The one person missing is Archie’s boss, Nero Wolfe (Death of an Art Collector, 2019, etc.), and fans will breathe a sigh of relief when he appears at Marjorie’s door, debriefs Archie, notices a telltale clue, prepares dinner for everyone, sleeps on his discovery, and arranges a meeting of all parties in Marjorie’s living room in which he names the killer.
The parts with Nero Wolfe, the only character Goldsborough brings to life, are almost worth waiting for.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5988-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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