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PAST LYING

Ingenious, humane, and all too telling as a reminder of the costs of the pandemic even on its survivors.

Edinburgh DCI Karen Pirie of the Historic Cases Unit takes on a fiendishly difficult assignment made even harder by the exigencies of the Covid-19 lockdown.

Now that Hamish Mackenzie, her coffee chain–owning boyfriend, is off in the Highlands, Karen’s settled into his home together with DS Daisy Mortimer, her lockdown flatmate. She’s allowed one hour of outdoor exercise a day, and she’s been warned to keep her distance from members of the public. So it’s lucky for her that mystery novelist Jake Stein, the leading suspect in the disappearance of Lara Hardie, an EU student who vanished a year ago, has died himself in the meantime. The weightiest piece of evidence against Jake, whose career had taken a sudden downturn after an ex-lover’s public accusations of sexual abuse had sent both his wife and publisher heading for the exits, is truly chilling: The Vanishing of Laurel Oliver, an unfinished manuscript he left behind that laid out in meticulous detail how fictional crime writer Jamie Cobain, an obvious stand-in for his author, lured the title character into an isolated location and strangled her so that he could frame his chess partner and professional rival Rob Thomas, a thinly disguised version of Ross McEwen, the rising mystery novelist and chess partner who’d taken up with Jake’s ex-wife, for the murder. The tricky setup sounds like Anthony Horowitz, but the subplot, which concerns Karen’s troubled efforts to shelter a Syrian refugee on the run from the assassins whose attack back home led to the deaths of his wife and son, is pure McDermid.

Ingenious, humane, and all too telling as a reminder of the costs of the pandemic even on its survivors.

Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023

ISBN: 9780802161499

Page Count: -

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly

Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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

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ROBERT B. PARKER'S BURIED SECRETS

So, Paradise isn’t paradise, and the Parker legacy lives on.

Parker’s Jesse Stone series continues with more trouble in Paradise, Massachusetts.

Police Chief Jesse Stone does a welfare check at the urging of a local citizen named Matthew Peebles and discovers a dead body in a room piled high with trash and old Polaroids depicting murder victims, either garroted or shot in the head. Who werethese victims? Chief Stone improbably keeps the investigation local—no need to complicate the story with the state police or the FBI—and that helps maintain the small-town flavor of this entertaining tale. Stone hires a new cop, Derek Tate, for his understaffed department. But to put it mildly, Tate is a poor fit. Boss and newcomer have radically different concepts of policing: Stone sees himself as a servant of his community, while Tate only wants to catch criminals and crack heads. At one point, Stone asks him what he did on his shift: “Did you give a tourist directions? Did you help an old lady cross the street or get a little girl’s cat out of a tree? Anything at all like that?” Tate replies “That’s not what real cops do,” and proceeds to alienate “beloved institutional figure” Daisy, cafe owner and longtime provider of donuts and muffins to Paradise’s finest. Indeed, Tate could be a model fascist, and Stone’s biggest mistake is not firing him. Meanwhile, Peebles fears for his life because of his “aging mobster” great uncle, who just might have something to do with all those murders. If Peebles says anything to the cops, he knows he’s a dead man. Hell, he’s probably doomed anyway. Stone is a stand-up cop who puts his life on the line for the town he loves, and his dealings with friends and colleagues are fun to witness: “I’m the chief. I’m supposed to tell you what to do,” he tells Molly Crane, his deputy chief. “It’s adorable that you think that,” she replies. And when all Paradise cops are banned from Daisy’s cafe because of Tate’s stupidity, Stone navigates treacherous territory while showing respect. This is Farnsworth’s first entry in the series created by Robert Parker, and fans will be pleased.

So, Paradise isn’t paradise, and the Parker legacy lives on.

Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025

ISBN: 9780593544761

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024

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