And perhaps they won’t, as an intriguing Epilogue and coy Author’s Note slyly suggest. Long may the Moosepath League...
Reid’s expert appropriation of the benign world of Charles Dickens continues in this third volume of his richly entertaining saga (Cordelia Underwood, 1998; Mollie Peer, 1997).
It’s an agreeably overplotted farrago, set once again in Portland, Maine, and environs in 1896, and featuring the ineffably Pickwickian Tobias Walton, his stouthearted young comrade Sundry Moss, and their irresistibly ingenuous and gentlemanly fellow “Moosepathians” Ephram, Eagleton, and Thump. After some overstuffed early pages that creak and wheeze a bit making plot connections with the earlier books, Reid settles into the business of juxtaposing the “odyssey of the heart” undertaken by the eponymous Daniel, a lawyer who may know something about the orphaned boy Bird of Mollie Peer, with the Moosepathians’ intricately interrelated separate ordeals and discoveries. These involve variously motivated searches for Viking artifacts, an elopement and an illegitimate birth, a ghostly visitation, a possibly sinister antiquarian society’s quest for the “lost city” of Norumbega (now Bangor) located on the fabled “northwest passage” to Canada, a body found in the Portland harbor, the twice-told tale of “The Rune and the Worm” (a delicious amalgam of Native American and Norse mythologies), and the remarkable word boustrophedan. Also implicated, in cheerfully mystifying ways, are such memorable folk as expert woodsman “Capital” Gaines, the five elderly Pettengill sisters, secretive Ezra Burnbrake, and Tobias’s rival for the love of matronly Phileda McCannon: Charleston Thistlecoat. If this engaging folderol doesn’t charm your socks off, you’ve probably been reading too much Bret Easton Ellis and A.M. Homes. Reid really has mastered Dickens’s techniques of cross-plotting and creating narrative echoes that function as both foreshadowing and revelation—not to mention comic characters so vivid and heartwarming you wish their crazily entangled stories would never end.
And perhaps they won’t, as an intriguing Epilogue and coy Author’s Note slyly suggest. Long may the Moosepath League flourish.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-89171-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
