An interesting, albeit meandering, story about people who like neither the police nor one another.
Pop-culture journalist Shaw digs back into the swinging ’60s to solve the murder of a Beatles fan.
This debut novel introduces an unlikely pairing in “Paddy” Breen, an experienced, albeit cynical, criminal investigator on the London Metropolitan Police’s Murder Squad, and Helen Tozer, a new deputy constable assigned to the squad at a time when women were tokens. The year is 1968, and a body is found not too far from Abby Road and the Beatles’ recording studio. Breen and Tozer are assigned to work the case of the dead girl found under a mattress near a housing complex. The two soon develop a theory that she may have been one of the many groupies who spends their time hanging around the Beatles, hoping for a glimpse of the Fab Four. London and the youth culture are changing, and Breen is not ready for the upheaval, but Tozer, who hails from the countryside, embraces the times. Although an odd pair, they bond in an unexpected sort of way and soon find themselves puzzling through the case. Meanwhile, Breen fights his reputation as a coward, earned when he ran away during an attack on another officer. The investigation takes them into strange places, from a wealthy former model’s country estate to Beatle George Harrison’s driveway to a ball for the benefit of the impoverished nation of Biafra, but eventually, the police pair makes their way through mod London to find out who killed the girl and why. Shaw’s profession lends itself to accurately portraying London when the Beatles and Rolling Stones ruled the music charts, but in his hands, the residents of 1968 England (with the exception of Breen and Tozer’s parents) wax crude, rude and sometimes vulgar at the tamest of provocations.
An interesting, albeit meandering, story about people who like neither the police nor one another.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-24684-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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
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