bookshelf

SHERLOCK HOLMES, THE MISSING YEARS

Name: SHERLOCK HOLMES, THE MISSING YEARS
Author: Vasudev Murthy
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0452-4

TIMBUKTU

by Vasudev Murthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 2016

Shame on you, says Watson, if you don’t like the heroes in their unaccustomed new roles. Readers who expect Holmes and...

bookshelf

Yet another version of what the Great Detective was up to during the busiest period of his life: the three years when he was presumed dead.

Murthy, who’s already offered a quite different account of the Great Hiatus (Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years: Japan, 2015), now begs to differ with himself. Holmes wasn’t in the Far East between 1891 and 1894 after all; he was in Italy and Africa in pursuit of a manuscript from the time of Marco Polo, half of which Antonio Rozzi, chief conservator of the Venice Museum, brought to Baker Street shortly before Holmes’ disagreement with Professor Moriarty led to those greatly exaggerated reports of his death. Since the manuscript, once its two halves are united, promises the secret of everlasting life, the stakes are high. Nor is Holmes, disguised as a Polish priest with the implicit blessing of the Holy See, the only person who’s looking for it. A Tangier secret society called the Guardian of the Letter, which has had custody of the second half of the manuscript for 500 years, has been so stirred up by a visit from Thalassery Vatoot Mohammad Koya, an Indian cinnamon merchant descended from its original author, that they’ve joined forces with Col. Sebastian Moran, Moriarty’s right-hand man, to seize the Venetian half. If this sounds like a recipe for exotic adventure and canned history rather than crime and detection, that’s exactly what it is, and Holmes, though he naturally excels as explorer and diplomat, has precious little to do—and Watson, who spends most of his time grousing about his companion’s undying fondness for writing obscure monographs, still less—in the role that made him famous.

Shame on you, says Watson, if you don’t like the heroes in their unaccustomed new roles. Readers who expect Holmes and Watson to act like Holmes and Watson may want to think twice before taking this particular plunge.

Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-4642-0452-4

Page Count: 318

Publisher: Poisoned Pen

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | INTERNATIONAL CRIME | HISTORICAL MYSTERY | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

bookshelf

A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
TWO NIGHTS
by Kathy Reichs

bookshelf

THE WINNER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997

bookshelf

Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)