Harris (The Devil’s Breath, 2013, etc.) successfully balances history, homicide, science, sorcery and social justice in his...
An American physician in post–Revolutionary War England takes on a potent drug, a baffling murder and a determined rival.
When the headless body of botanical artist Matthew Bartlett is found tied to a pier in the Thames, anatomist Dr. Thomas Silkstone knows he’s in for a hard time. Not only does he want to solve the murder, but he’s also lost the last key member of a doomed expedition to Jamaica. Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, has asked Silkstone to catalog the flora and fauna collected by the two doctors who headed the expedition. It appears they were in search of a plant, the branched calalue bush, that would greatly benefit the medical community. But both doctors died of yellow fever, and Bartlett, who brought the ship home with the results of the expedition, was also entrusted with a detailed journal that’s gone missing. So has the one surviving sample of the calalue, which is a component in the African folk religion of Obeah. The plant can reportedly induce a deathlike state and is rumored to have an antidote that will bring patients back from the dead. However, it leaves them in a compliant state, perfect for use—and misuse—by military agents and West Indies planters who are allowed to bring their slaves to England, where slavery has been banned. When Jeremiah Taylor, a slave who overhears a conversation about another sinister effect of the drug, runs away and finds shelter with Silkstone, the Philadelphia-born doctor takes up Jeremiah’s cause with a pair of abolitionists. At the same time, Silkstone hopes for a reunion with Lady Lydia Farrell, the woman he loves but can’t marry because of a court order, without realizing that she’s in danger from a powerful enemy who can separate the couple indefinitely.
Harris (The Devil’s Breath, 2013, etc.) successfully balances history, homicide, science, sorcery and social justice in his idealistic hero’s fourth case. The only disappointment is a maddeningly inconclusive ending.Pub Date: July 29, 2014
ISBN: 9780758293374
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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
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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