Burrows’ bird-watching expertise lends authenticity to an excellent mystery whose conflicted protagonist faces hard...
A police detective with a tough case is distracted by moral ambiguities in his own life.
Brilliant DCI Domenic Jejeune (A Siege of Bitterns, 2014) is that rara avis, a Canadian serving in the British police force. Just as the Saltmarsh cops are called in to investigate the brutal murder of environmental scientist Philip Wayland, Jejeune has to leave for the Scottish Highlands, where local police have found a bird guide with his name on it on the unidentified body of a man who fell from a coastal cliff. Jejeune recognizes the book as a message from his reckless older brother, Damian, who’s in trouble with the law and wants his help. Both brothers are avid birders, and Damian made the trip to Great Britain with the dead man, who wanted his help illegally trapping wild gyrfalcons. Filled with trepidation, Jejeune takes Damian back to the Norfolk home he shares with his girlfriend, journalist Lindy Hey. In the meantime, his team, including his sergeant, Danny Maik, has been searching for clues in Wayland’s murder. Wayland was working in carbon-capture research, first at the Old Dairy property financed by Emirati Crown Prince Ibrahim al-Haladin, then switching to the nearby university where his fiancee works, raising hackles among some key parties. The public footpath leading through the Old Dairy property where Wayland was found has been the scene of several protests over the project, which threatens to destroy much of the local coastline, and the protesters are likely suspects. His colleagues naturally wonder why Jejeune is so distracted, and when a young woman working with gyrfalcons on the prince’s land is ostensibly killed by one of them, Jejeune keeps to himself his search for a connection between the man dead in Scotland and his own case.
Burrows’ bird-watching expertise lends authenticity to an excellent mystery whose conflicted protagonist faces hard decisions.Pub Date: May 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4597-3214-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dundurn
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
If you’re in a receptive mood, nobody evokes long postwar shadows or overwhelming postwar grief better than Todd.
Inspector Ian Rutledge’s 22nd case revolves around two young women found dead in utterly unexpected places.
Scheduled to give evidence in an ongoing investigation, Rutledge can’t go to the village of Avebury—where a body has been found stabbed to death in the center of a circle of prehistoric stones—in the place of Chief Inspector Brian Leslie when Rutledge’s nemesis, Chief Superintendent Markham, sends Leslie there when he'd been looking forward to a couple of days off. Instead, Rutledge ends up going to the Shropshire village of Tern Bridge, where a woman eventually identified as Bath schoolmistress Serena Palmer has been stabbed and tossed into a grave dug the day before for someone else. After a witness’s unexpectedly keen eye and sharp memory puts Rutledge on a trail that leads with disconcerting suddenness to Serena Palmer’s killer, he’s sent to Avebury after all, since Leslie’s conscientiously thorough inquiries have identified neither the killer nor the victim. This mystery, Rutledge finds, is just as murky as the Shropshire murder was clear, and he despairs that he’ll ever have anything to add to Leslie’s report. Constantly threatened by Markham, who’s still holding the letter of resignation Rutledge submitted to him after his last case (The Black Ascot, 2019, etc.), and intermittently needled by the ghost of Cpl. Hamish McLeod, the corporal he executed in a trench in 1916 when he refused to lead troops into further fighting in the Somme, Rutledge struggles with a case whose every lead—a necklace of lapis lazuli beads, a trove of letters written to the victim—leads him not so much to enlightenment as to ever deepening sadness. The final twist may not surprise eagle-eyed readers, but it will reveal why Todd’s generic-sounding title is painfully apt.
If you’re in a receptive mood, nobody evokes long postwar shadows or overwhelming postwar grief better than Todd.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-290553-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Trenton's most unlikely bounty hunter, Stephanie Plum, is looking for Kenny Mancuso, who jumped bail after shooting his onetime friend Moogey Bues in the knee. And she's been hired to do a little work on the side for creepy, marriage-minded undertaker Spiro Stiva, who's missing two dozen empty caskets. But instead of getting on Mancuso's tail, Stephanie (One for the Money, 1994) finds Mancuso on hers—he's sending her body parts excised from Stiva's deceased clients, taunting her in their face-to-face meetings, and going after her irrepressible Grandma Mazur with an ice pick—and by the time she locates the caskets, they're about to be set afire. Meantie, somebody has returned to Moogey Bues's gas station to shoot him dead, and Joe Morelli, the swivel-hipped stallion of Trenton Vice who's always had the hots for Stephanie, has tied both Mancuso and Moogey's equally menacing colleague Perry Sandeman into a big-time theft of government arms. But how can Stephanie ever fit the pieces of the puzzle together when her cockeyed burg puts her hamster under constant threat of death, and her manicurist tells her, "I used to carry a forty-five, but I got bursitis from the weight"? The first must-read of the new year: more action and laughs than two weeks in Trenton.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-19638-7
Page Count: 301
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
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