The detection is nominal, and the mystery takes a back seat to the comic bedlam that reigns throughout. But readers who have...
This first novel from Australian science writer Flannery (Atmosphere of Hope, 2015, etc.) travels back in time to 1932-1933—and back in cultural mores a lot further—when intrigue swirls around an aboriginal mask enshrined in the Sydney Museum.
“Enshrined” may not be quite the right word. Anthropologist Archibald Meek, returning from five years embedded with the natives of Venus Island, is horrified to discover the gigantic mask, ringed with 32 human skulls, prominently displayed in the museum’s boardroom. To be fair, Dr. Vere Griffon, the museum’s director, is equally unhappy that Archie overstayed his Venus Island posting by two years and fears he may have gone native—a fear shared in her own way by virginal archaeology registrar Beatrice Goodenough, who, swept off her feet by Archie’s posted marriage proposal, was seriously jolted by the personal gift that followed it. While he’s trying to mend fences with Beatrice, Archie can’t help noticing that four of the skulls surrounding the fetish are a different color than the others and that the buck-toothed mouth of one of them reminds Archie very much of Cecil Polkinghorne, his mentor, the latest of four museum employees to have vanished without a trace. Could someone be removing the original skulls, memorials of an 1892 shipwreck, and replacing them with more recently harvested products? Archie has precious little energy to devote to serious detective work when he must spend his days negotiating a cast of colleagues, board members, and government overseers straight out of P.G. Wodehouse and renegotiating his relationship with his ladylove. But the truth is bound to out, one way or another.
The detection is nominal, and the mystery takes a back seat to the comic bedlam that reigns throughout. But readers who have never before encountered sentences like “He knew he must get his foreskin back” will cheer Archie’s debut and hope for more.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07942-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
As tangled and turbulent as the hero’s nightmares, and that’s saying quite a bit.
Having survived his tempestuous debut, P.T. Marsh, of Georgia's Mason Falls Police Department, is back for more—including some residue from that first case that just won’t go away.
Dispatched like an errand boy to wealthy real estate mogul Ennis Fultz’s home to find out why he hasn’t joined his bridge buddies, Mayor Stems and interim police chief Jeff Pernacek, for their monthly game, Marsh and his partner, Remy Morgan, find Fultz dead in his bed. It turns out that his passing, devoutly longed for by so many of the people he’d crushed or outwitted on his way to the top, was helped along by the strategic dose of nitrogen somebody substituted for the oxygen he inhaled regularly, especially when he was expecting particular demands on his virility. Marsh and Morgan quickly focus on two candidates who might have made those demands: Suzy Kang, a recent visitor who was so eager to cover any traces that she’d been to Fultz’s house that she sold the car she’d driven there, and Connie Fultz, the victim’s ex-wife and perhaps his current lover, who acidly swats them away and tells them: “Look for some little gal who’s into bondage.” McMahon excels in sweating the procedural details of the investigation, which take the partners from a search for Suzy Kang and that missing car to a not-so-accidental car crash that’s evidently targeted a young girl who has no idea she’s implicated in the case. But he’s set his sights higher, taking in everything from a civil suit the relatives of the perp Marsh shot in The Good Detective (2019) have launched against him to a possible conspiracy behind the deaths of his deeply grieved wife and son, all of it larded with Georgia attitude and truisms, a few of which rise to eloquence (“I wasn’t good at faith. I was good at proof”).
As tangled and turbulent as the hero’s nightmares, and that’s saying quite a bit.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53556-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Schneider’s debut enlivens the police procedural with offbeat characters and an appealingly complex hero.
Hollywood detectives catch the strange case of a brutally burned body.
Detective Tully Jarsdel is a former academic, leading his partner, Morales, to call him Professor. When he fights his way through multiple news crews to reach a corpse one day, it's unlike any he’s ever seen. The body is twisted, partially ravaged, and burned so badly it’s unrecognizable. Jarsdel and Morales intensely question Dustin Sparks, the horror-movie special-effects expert who found the body. He eventually admits that he saw the body being dumped from a van, but his addiction to OxyContin makes him a compromised witness. While waiting for DNA results, Jarsdel and Morales watch missing persons reports closely. An odd red disk glued to the victim’s palm turns out to be a 1996 quarter painted red: the case’s first clue, albeit a murky one. DNA connects the victim to grizzled convict Lawrence Wolin, who identifies the man as his brother. The pieces of Grant Wolin’s life come together via interviews prompted by a search of his dirty apartment. He sold jars of “genuine Hollywood dirt” on the street, smoked marijuana occasionally, and was apparently asexual. A dinner scene at the home of Jarsdel’s scholarly parents provides insight into his psyche and his sense of isolation. Though he fits in with neither the gritty world of police work nor the ivory tower of academia, he has a passion for justice.
Schneider’s debut enlivens the police procedural with offbeat characters and an appealingly complex hero.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4926-8444-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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