Unlike Lawrence Block, Saylor is not equally at home in short stories and novels, and none of these mysteries is very...
Ancient Rome’s preeminent private eye plies his trade in nine reprints culled from the past ten years.
Between 77 and 64 b.c.e., Gordianus (The Judgment of Caesar, 2004, etc.) is in demand for a wide variety of cases. In “The White Fawn,” the most inventive of these tales, renegade general Quintus Sertorius demands that Gordianus recover the missing deer that he insists advises him in warfare. Decimus Brutus wants him to investigate his wife Sempronia, whom he suspects of adultery and murderous plotting in “The Consul’s Wife.” Gordianus investigates murder in “Archimedes’ Tomb” and the more ingenious “Death by Eros,” an apparent return from the grave in “A Gladiator Dies Only Once,” and what looks like copyright infringement in “Something Fishy in Pompeii.” In “The Cherries of Lucullus,” the retired consul wants him to prove, against all evidence, that his gardener is really an escaped Roman rebel leader. And a beloved toy of his son Eco goes mysteriously missing in the charming “If a Cyclops Could Vanish in the Blink of an Eye.”
Unlike Lawrence Block, Saylor is not equally at home in short stories and novels, and none of these mysteries is very mysterious—“Poppy and the Poisoned Cake” is perhaps the most anticlimactic—yet they all engagingly evoke the last days of the Roman Republic and show the often tumultuous domestic lives of Gordianus’ lofty real-life acquaintances.Pub Date: June 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-27120-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
Schneider’s debut enlivens the police procedural with offbeat characters and an appealingly complex hero.
Hollywood detectives catch the strange case of a brutally burned body.
Detective Tully Jarsdel is a former academic, leading his partner, Morales, to call him Professor. When he fights his way through multiple news crews to reach a corpse one day, it's unlike any he’s ever seen. The body is twisted, partially ravaged, and burned so badly it’s unrecognizable. Jarsdel and Morales intensely question Dustin Sparks, the horror-movie special-effects expert who found the body. He eventually admits that he saw the body being dumped from a van, but his addiction to OxyContin makes him a compromised witness. While waiting for DNA results, Jarsdel and Morales watch missing persons reports closely. An odd red disk glued to the victim’s palm turns out to be a 1996 quarter painted red: the case’s first clue, albeit a murky one. DNA connects the victim to grizzled convict Lawrence Wolin, who identifies the man as his brother. The pieces of Grant Wolin’s life come together via interviews prompted by a search of his dirty apartment. He sold jars of “genuine Hollywood dirt” on the street, smoked marijuana occasionally, and was apparently asexual. A dinner scene at the home of Jarsdel’s scholarly parents provides insight into his psyche and his sense of isolation. Though he fits in with neither the gritty world of police work nor the ivory tower of academia, he has a passion for justice.
Schneider’s debut enlivens the police procedural with offbeat characters and an appealingly complex hero.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4926-8444-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A good detective in an incendiary procedural.
A Yorkshire detective untangles an old murder and new arsons.
DS Adam Tyler, a cold-case investigator for the South Yorkshire Police, is a bit of a loner, but his boss wants him to network more so he lets Sally-Ann, one of his civilian colleagues, talk him into joining a pub evening with the South Yorkshire Police LGBT Support Network. He doesn't plan to stay long, and when he meets a handsome man at the bar—"Sweetheart, he was everyone's type. Even mine," Sally-Ann says—he abandons the group to go home with him. The next morning, when he gets to work, Sally-Ann tells him there's big news: The body of Gerald Cartwright, a local tycoon and shady character who disappeared years ago, has been found in the basement of his own house during a renovation ordered by his 21-year-old son, who'd just inherited it. Tyler manages to get himself assigned to the investigation though the detective who's been working on it since Cartwright's disappearance doesn't want to hand it over to cold cases; he soon discovers the identity of his one-night stand: Oscar Cartwright, son of the deceased and potential suspect, which further complicates his position. Meanwhile, Edna and Lily, elderly Cartwright retainers of various duties, have begun receiving unsettling anonymous letters, and the whole community is rattled by a series of arsons that seem more and more likely to be related to the discovery of Cartwright's body. As Tyler's investigation slowly uncovers a sordid history of manipulation and abuse, the violence increases and he is assaulted several times. The repetitive nature of these assaults is a weakness in the book, but the richness of Tyler's character and the vividness of his negotiation of his own sexuality and the casual bigotry in his community are effective. The subsidiary characters are lively and believable, the arsons are particularly well described, and though the plot sometimes seems gratuitously complex, this is a rewarding entertainment.
A good detective in an incendiary procedural.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-54202-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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