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
A delightful debut whodunit written with abundant wit and flair. Pray for a series to follow.
An affluent 19th-century wife and aspiring sleuth perseveres in the face of police skepticism to probe a series of suspicious deaths in Cracow.
A provocative prologue introduces an anonymous killer sneaking away after examining a frail corpse. The year is 1893, and restless Zofia Turbotyńska struggles, because of her provincial roots, to be accepted in Cracow high society. Keeping an efficient household for her husband, esteemed medical professor Ignacy Turbotyński doesn’t satisfy her. So she undertakes various projects to occupy her time and prove her worth. When her cook, Franciszka, asks for time off to visit her grandmother at Helcel House, Zofia decides to solicit the residents for donations to a charity raffle she’s organizing for the benefit of scrofulous children. The benevolent nuns who run the house are receptive. On her initial visit, Zofia notices a bit of a stir over Mrs. Mohr, a resident who’s gone missing. Her reading of Poe surely has an effect on her, for when she visits Helcel House again, Zofia takes the initiative to question the staff about the still-missing resident. Strangely invigorated, she undertakes a search of the premises and discovers Mrs. Mohr’s body hidden under a blanket in the attic. The consensus is a fatal fall while wandering. Zofia is not so sure. When another Helcel resident is found murdered, Zofia alone links the two deaths and doggedly proceeds to investigate. In a nod to Victorian convention, Szymiczkowa (the pseudonym of partners Jacek Dehnel and Piotr Tarczyński) begins each chapter with a wry summary of what’s to come.
A delightful debut whodunit written with abundant wit and flair. Pray for a series to follow.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-358-27424-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Charming characters, information on book restoration, and plenty of angst and spycraft do not quite make up for the mundane...
A honeymoon, a rare book, and a past history of spying create a volatile mix.
On her last day in Paris, bookbinder and restorer Brooklyn Wainwright (Buried in Books, 2018, etc.), honeymooning in France with her security-expert husband, former spy Derek Stone, buys Derek a copy of The Spy Who Loved Me as a wedding gift. Soon thereafter, she spots Derek talking to someone who seems to be an old friend and notices a man in a hoodie watching them both. Both Derek and his friend, ex-colleague Ned Davies, shrug the watcher off. Back in their San Francisco loft, Brooklyn discovers that her inexpensive purchase is worth over $7,000, and Derek finds his business in turmoil over a troublemaking employee. A visit to SPECTRE, a shop that sells books and surveillance equipment and includes a cafe and escape rooms, gives Derek the idea of using its features to build trust among his squabbling employees. Owen Gibbons, another former colleague, who owns SPECTRE, asks Brooklyn to lend her newfound book for his anniversary celebration and assures her that his top-drawer security will keep it safe. They also meet Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, and Drummer Girl, a group of young writers who hang out in the cafe. The snake in the office is Lark, a beautiful but evil woman who hates Brooklyn for marrying Derek. Everyone but Lark enjoys the escape room experience. Each room has a different theme and is filled with clues that participants must use in order to escape in the time allowed. The plot turns deadly when someone breaks into SPECTRE, attempting to steal the book, and kills Tailor, who’s working late. The whole episode is caught on tape, but the well-disguised killer can’t be identified. Meanwhile, a note from Ned that accurately predicts his own murder suggests that Derek look for a list of names hidden in Brooklyn’s book, one of them Ned’s killer.
Charming characters, information on book restoration, and plenty of angst and spycraft do not quite make up for the mundane plot.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-451-49140-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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