Glorious deaths bursting with the guilty glow of sex.
All her pages suffused purple from lividity, Doc Gerritsen’s morgue slab awaits you, reader.
Brilliantly, Gerritsen (The Apprentice, 2002, etc.) has her regular Boston Homicide Detective Jane Rizzoli play second lead to Medical Examiner Maura Isles, known as the Queen of the Dead, who autopsies all of Jane’s vics and supplies more deliciously grisly pages this time than in Gerritsen’s last two outings combined. While Rizzoli handles the crimes, Dr. Isles delivers arias on death and the sweet hell of human existence. And as much of this plays out against the frozen stones of Graystones Abbey—a nunnery where a youthful nun lies battered to death and an aged nun, also battered, is dying—as under Isles’s examining scalpel and X-ray photos of crushed skulls and bullet fragments scattered about a vic’s sternum. But Isles and Rizzoli are enmeshed and struggling as well with richly detailed love lives that have the reader suffering right along with the two leads, with Isles panting after her world-hopping divorced saint of a doctor-husband and Rizzoli fighting her lust for the FBI agent she bedded in The Apprentice—something she must pay for now. Autopsy reveals that the dead young nun had just given birth (no one knew she was pregnant) before being murdered in the midnight chapel. Where’s the baby? Another murder pops up in a deserted Italian restaurant: a woman with her hands and feet removed and her face stripped off. Why her feet? Or her face? Now, that’s enough. “A place of death has a power all its own. Long after the body is removed and the blood scrubbed away, such a place still retains the memory of what has happened there. It holds echoes of screams, the lingering scent of fear. And like a black hole, it sucks into its vortex the rapt attention of the living, who cannot turn away, cannot resist a glimpse into hell.”
Glorious deaths bursting with the guilty glow of sex.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45891-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
Careful research, a driving plot, wry wit, and compelling characters make this a most entertaining read.
The real-life Victorian police detective who was the inspiration for Charles Dickens’ Mr. Bucket serves as the main character in a fast-paced historical mystery.
Although this is Mason’s debut novel for adults, he’s an accomplished playwright. Those skills are evident in the crisp dialogue and well-structured scenes of this book. It begins with a bang in 1860 as Chief Detective Inspector Charles Field, assigned to guard Queen Victoria and Prince Albert during a public appearance, witnesses an assassination attempt. The shooter, who’s arrested, is mentally ill, but Field quickly begins to suspect the man is just a tool of a conspiracy—one connected to the controversy over the new ideas of the naturalist Charles Darwin. Field’s determined pursuit of the truth is sometimes snagged by his celebrity; Dickens fans, including some in the royal family, insist on calling him “Mr. Bucket” and confusing the fictional policeman with the real one. Field persists, however, plunging into a dizzyingly complex plot that takes him all over London and off to Germany. The cast of characters teems with satisfyingly despicable villains, many of them based on real aristocrats and scientists. The most villainous, however, is the memorably terrifying Decimus Cobb, a former choirboy–turned–Victorian-era Hannibal Lecter. Countering Cobb and the other bad guys are the earnestly heroic Field, his resourceful wife, a kidnapped butcher’s boy, and Prince Albert, who gets a touchingly human portrayal. There are cameos by such famous figures as Karl Marx, Dickens, and, of course, Darwin. With many grisly murders and many shocking surprises along the way, the book rockets toward a last dark twist.
Careful research, a driving plot, wry wit, and compelling characters make this a most entertaining read.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-634-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
The intricate puzzle and continuing Irish atmosphere make this the series’ best to date.
A clever Irish lass is not afraid to voice her opinion.
Siobhán O’Sullivan may be still fairly new to the Garda, but she seems to have a real aptitude for crime solving (Murder in an Irish Churchyard, 2018, etc.). In addition, she and her boss, DS Macdara Flannery, have established an unapproved romantic relationship, and she’s “mother” to her siblings, all of whom help run a bistro in Kilbane, a picture-perfect town that’s hosting both an Arts and Music Festival and an International Poker Tournament. The card players include top-seeded Eamon Foley, aka the Octopus, who’s brought along his heavily pregnant wife, Rose. Foley’s closet rivals, Clementine Hart and Shane Ross, are eager to unseat him. After winning big with “the Dead Man’s Hand,” Foley is accused of cheating. Unhappy referee Nathan Doyle announces that he’ll review the tapes and deliver his ruling the next morning. Meanwhile, the unruly and well-oiled crowd moves on to Sharkey’s Pub, where the next morning Siobhán finds the body of Foley hanging in a locked storeroom. His death looks like suicide, but Siobhán, certain it’s murder, pleads her case to Macdara. The contents of Foley’s pocket include a set of brass knuckles, two defaced playing cards, and an apparent suicide note but no keys, wallet, money, or mobile phone. Among the locals who had placed unwise wagers with Foley before he died is Henry Moore, who bet his daughter Amanda’s racehorse. Both of Foley's rivals would be glad to see him gone, and his wife’s sorrow is limited to the prize money she’s never going to collect. Despite some reluctance from Macdara, Siobhán continues to dig, even in places he warns her to avoid, straining their relationship in her determination to leave no stone unturned.
The intricate puzzle and continuing Irish atmosphere make this the series’ best to date.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1904-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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