Short on mystery, but heightened by an impressive atmosphere and a first-rate inspector.
In Mehta’s debut novel, a woman is murdered in the midst of conducting a séance, leaving the police swamped with motives and suspects.
It’s nearing Christmas in Chicago 1953. Rosa Carter gathers friends and family for a séance, her true intention, it seems, being to appease Adolf Hitler’s spirit, which has been haunting her. But before she can call forth Hitler’s ghost to reveal secrets, Rosa collapses with a bullet in the head. Inspector Charlie Poe learns that nearly every attendee had reason to want Rosa dead, even the woman’s goddaughter, Carol, who may very well be the child of Hitler. Author Mehta sets the stage for an old-fashioned murder mystery: an abundance of suspects in the same room when the murder occurs and a title that’ll have readers keeping an eye on the victim-to-be. But the novel changes its tactic just as police begin questioning suspects one by one, with lengthy flashbacks that aren’t necessarily recollections, such as Carol’s mother, Ann, flashing back to working at a London hospital in 1940, including a conversation for which she wasn’t present. The flashbacks also reveal Rosa’s curious, sordid past, some of which is even more intriguing than her friendship with Hitler (e.g., being revered in India as the white Hindu with a noted singing voice), but those plot points add little to the mystery, particularly since they offer mostly the same information divulged through interrogations. And the investigation itself a bit peculiar: Poe and others seem more interested in exposing motives than compiling evidence; oddly enough, they end up arresting the one suspect who doesn’t seem to have a motive. The firmly established 1953 setting is the book’s strong suit—blistering cold weather and hefty snow occasionally halt the case—and a strong second half forgoes the flashbacks in favor of boosting the mystery with more murders, both attempted and successful. Inspector Poe, who handles the bulk of the case, is a winsome, likable man. His relationship with Sammy, his perpetually upbeat and loyal cocker spaniel, proves more rewarding than his romance with Mandy, a receptionist who’s introduced too late in the story to make much of an impact.
Short on mystery, but heightened by an impressive atmosphere and a first-rate inspector.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479239498
Page Count: 348
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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