by Steven Price ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 4, 2016
Fans of steampunk and Victorian detective fiction alike will enjoy Price’s continent-hopping romp in time.
Canadian poet Price turns to fiction with this lively visitation to the foggy streets of Victorian Blighty.
“Water in the cracks, water shimmering like mercury at the edges of the light-fall. There were streaks of black moss growing on the walls where moisture trickled.” Atmospheric: that just begins to describe this overstuffed, long, but swiftly paced novel, which works from a promising premise, in which the already famed private detective William Pinkerton, late of the Civil War and capable of striking fear in the heart of every wrongdoer in America, finds himself in London on the trail of a slippery con man with the suggestive name of Edward Shade. Shade’s more than just a bilko; the tentacles of his criminal enterprise extend everywhere, and somehow they’ve wrapped themselves around a woman with “small sharp teeth, long white fingers, a voice low and vicious and lovely.” Charlotte Reckitt has a past piled on a past, only a bit of which overlaps with that of Adam Foole, a fine gentleman blessed of “glowing catlike stare” now newly entangled in Charlotte’s web once again. Pinkerton, Foole, and a “giant” named Japheth Flood form an unlikely alliance and sally forth to ferret out Shade and Reckitt, each for his own reasons, in the dripping streets and sewers of a decidedly Dickensian London. Price serves up a whodunit that’s sometimes a little faltering of plot but long on lyricism: “He sipped his port and William watched the morning light flare and fracture in the cut glass but he himself did not drink and he held the delicate glass between his thick fingers feeling rough and tired.” In the end, the story is utterly Sherlock-ian—read Moriarty for Shade and Irene Adler for Reckitt—and postmodernly so, full of sly nods and winks and allusions. If it is derivative in the bargain, Conan Doyle by way of Nicholas Meyer and Benedict Cumberbatch, then Price’s yarn is also a lot of fun.
Fans of steampunk and Victorian detective fiction alike will enjoy Price’s continent-hopping romp in time.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-16053-1
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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
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