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
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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
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