A fair historical mystery that will most interest dedicated fans of Lincolniana.
Huffington Post national editor O’Brien (TrumpNation, 2005) ventures into fiction in this historical thriller, featuring an 1865 detective digging into the murder of Abraham Lincoln.
Metropolitan Police Inspector Temple McFadden sees a messenger get his throat slit at the B&O Railroad station in Washington, D.C. Temple takes a package containing a journal and a diary from the man’s corpse. It turns out that these are no ordinary finds: One is the diary of Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of the recently slain president, while the other was written by Lincoln’s murderer, John Wilkes Booth, and includes mysterious coded messages. McFadden immediately finds himself targeted by dangerous men who are after the package, and he enlists the help of several friends in an investigation that reveals an undiscovered plot behind Lincoln’s assassination. O’Brien’s fiction debut joins other recent Lincoln-related historical novels, such as Stephen L. Carter’s alternate-history tale The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln and William Martin’s The Lincoln Letter, a somewhat similar mystery that revolves around a lost Lincoln diary. O’Brien has delivered a serviceable thriller, even if he often leans a bit too heavily on brutal violence to shake things up. He has clearly put in a fair amount of research here, and he revels in the historical details he scatters liberally throughout the narrative; indeed, he occasionally drifts into history-lecture territory. That said, O'Brien does make clever use of real-life historical figures throughout, including such notables as Mrs. Lincoln, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, private detective Allan Pinkerton, photographer Alexander Gardner and journalist Noah Brooks, among many others.
A fair historical mystery that will most interest dedicated fans of Lincolniana.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-345-49677-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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