by Yrsa Sigurdardóttir ; translated by Philip Roughton ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 25, 2014
A multilayered tale that builds slowly—the use of smells is especially effective—but drives to a shattering climax that...
Sigurdardóttir’s work (The Day Is Dark, 2013, etc.) has always drawn on both kinds of mysteries—detective stories in which everything is explained rationally and supernatural thrillers in which it isn’t—but this tale of a series of disappearances grounded in long-simmering revenge mixes the two more inextricably than ever before.
Freyr, a consulting psychiatrist who’s been called to the scene of a schoolroom that’s been vandalized, finds nothing unusual about the way it’s been trashed and defaced by the word “dirty,” until he learns that the same thing happened to the same room 60 years ago. This apparent coincidence is rendered even more uncanny when Halla, a pensioner who was traumatized as a schoolchild by the earlier incident, hangs herself from a church ceiling—and when Freyr and his lover, Dagný, a police detective, learn of the high mortality rate among Halla’s classmates, none of whom died from natural causes. Meanwhile, in remote Hesteyri, an unemployed Reykjavík MBA, his schoolteacher wife and their widowed friend, who plan to rehab a disused building as a guesthouse, have a series of increasingly creepy run-ins with what seems to be a young boy’s ghost. Crosscutting between the two stories, Sigurdardóttir counterpoints the progress of the investigation into the schoolroom vandalism and its implications with the deterioration of the relations among the three rehabbers, whose encounters with the ghost become more dangerous as they learn more and more unwelcome news about each other. By the time one of them vanishes, Freyr’s realization that the vandalism case, which you’d think would be altogether safer, is linked to his own diabetic son’s more recent disappearance turns his investigation into an anguished search for the truth of his own life.
A multilayered tale that builds slowly—the use of smells is especially effective—but drives to a shattering climax that honors the traditions of both detective fiction and ghost stories.Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04562-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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by Yrsa Sigurdardóttir ; translated by Victoria Cribb
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by Yrsa Sigurdardóttir ; translated by Victoria Cribb
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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by Kathy Reichs
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by Kathy Reichs
BOOK REVIEW
by Kathy Reichs
by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997
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)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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