Spann’s homage to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None combines a puzzling mystery with a fascinating look at...
Who’s killing the Buddhist monks at a sacred mountain temple?
Ninja samurai Hiro Hattori and Father Mateo, the Portuguese priest he’s sworn to protect with his life, have journeyed in November 1565 to a Shingon temple high on Mount K?ya to deliver a warning. Hiro, who’s posing as Mateo’s translator, has a message for Ringa, a priest who’s also a spy for the Iga clan, to which Hiro belongs. Hiro and Father Mateo have escaped an attack on the Iga ryu, where Hiro’s longtime love was killed, filling him with rage and a thirst for revenge. Ringa has been charged with warning other Iga agents who stand in danger, but the first night Hiro and Father Mateo are at the temple, Ringa is murdered and his body posed as the Buddhist deity Fud? My?-?. Because the mountain is cut off from the world by a violent snowstorm, Hiro and Father Mateo (Betrayal at Iga, 2017, etc.) know that the murderer must be one of the priests or Soro, another visitor who’s arrived with a child. When Anan is the next to die, Hiro wonders whether someone plans to kill more priests and pose them all as the Kings of Hell, Buddhist judges of the afterlife. As Father Mateo becomes increasingly fascinated by what he’s learning about Buddhism and the priests question him about his own religion, tension mounts. The monks, who are all hiding secrets, would like to believe the killer is Soro, who Hiro thinks is lying about who he is. But would he bring along a child on such a murderous errand? As more deaths follow, Hiro becomes ever more certain that Father Mateo is also marked for death.
Spann’s homage to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None combines a puzzling mystery with a fascinating look at historical Buddhism.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63388-415-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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