Hamilton always gives good value, and this swift-moving, moody tale is no exception, even if the very last twist is perhaps...
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula will have to take care of itself this time. A newly paroled convict has recalled Alex McKnight (Misery Bay, 2011, etc.) to Detroit past and present.
Before a shooting sidelined him from the Detroit PD, Alex helped put away Darryl King, a 16-year-old black kid he saw running from the scene of Wayne State student Elana Paige’s murder. Over several grueling days, Alex first chased the boy, then went through volume after volume of mug shots and finally played a key role in the arrest that was credited to Detective Arnie Bateman. Now Alex’s old sergeant, Tony Grimaldi, wants him to know that Darryl is back on the street. Alex, who admits that “I don’t have much of a talent for putting things out of my mind,” can’t stop himself from making the five-hour drive down to Detroit, where he has dinner with FBI agent Janet Long and improbably shares milk and chocolate cake with Darryl’s mother, Jamilah King, who thinks he’s come to apologize for locking up the wrong man. And, in fact, the more Alex thinks about it, the more he wonders if Darryl really did stab Elana Paige to death. Just as he’s convinced himself that Darryl’s mother is right after all, Arnie Bateman is killed under circumstances that make Darryl look guiltier than ever. So Alex is left in the ironic position of desperately trying to track down and vindicate a man he was once equally desperate to track down and lock up.
Hamilton always gives good value, and this swift-moving, moody tale is no exception, even if the very last twist is perhaps one too many.Pub Date: July 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-64022-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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