Some delightfully astute sleuthing runs through this tightly written second case, fully stocked with menacing villains,...
Prolific author O’Rorke (Gemini Girl Murders, 2013, etc.), a former probation officer and youth counselor, offers the second installment in her Astrology Mysteries series.
This rousing follow-up whodunit once again stars young, vibrant Christian Vargas, a Washington state police department probation officer who, on the second anniversary of her husband Tony’s death, finds herself embroiled in another murderous melodrama. After Mormon runaway Whitney Clist, a pregnant teenager, is brutally bludgeoned and tossed into an already occupied casket before it’s buried, Vargas is on the scene. The investigation centers on a thriving satanic cult of sanguinarians (people who believe they must consume blood to maintain their health) governed by an evil leader named Cancer. What Vargas learns about the devoutly religious, greatly troubled Clist family puts her hot on Cancer’s trail through leads offered by kids close to Whitney, namely Stephanie, an astute crime lab technician, as well as Whitney’s oppressed mother and Doug, a gay ex-Mormon friend. Ignoring threats and warning signs to back off, Vargas moves in to apprehend the cult’s ringleader, who she discovers runs a malevolent satanic temple aimed at recruiting vulnerable teenagers—and he’s also a Clist family relative! A road trip to a nefarious, rigidly operated Mormon polygamist camp in Utah sets the scene for a showdown pitting Vargas and her rescuers against the felonious cult leader. Her investigative partner, Daniel, and current lover, Matt, are also along for the ride in this installment, bringing some much-needed romantic relief to a suspenseful, treacherous mystery. Some of O’Rorke’s narration becomes compromised by awkward prose and dated references—one young suspect is “hella scared”; another has a MySpace profile—but that won’t deter fans eager to catch up with Vargas, a brave, impulsive police heroine.
Some delightfully astute sleuthing runs through this tightly written second case, fully stocked with menacing villains, tireless investigators and romantic intrigue.Pub Date: March 15, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Agency
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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