Twelve years after the rape and murder of an 8-year-old schoolgirl, a new series of murders blossoms in her memory in Sigurdardóttir’s latest horrific police nightmare.
Since Iceland doesn’t imprison convicted criminals for life, Jón Jónsson is released after serving his time for having assaulted and smothered Vaka Orradóttir, who was in his house because she’d asked her classmate, Jónsson’s daughter, Sigrún, if she could use her home phone to call her father when he was late picking her up from school. Within a week, storm clouds are already converging over the demoted CID department manager Huldar from several directions. There’s the discovery of two severed hands in retired prosecutor Benedikt Toft’s hot tub. There’s a note discovered in a time capsule Vaka’s schoolmates buried 12 years ago: “in 2016 the following people are going to die: K, S, BT, JJ, OV, and I.” There’s a series of present-tense threats prosecutor Thorvaldur Svavarsson receives from reckoning@gmail.com. And there’s the murder of Benedikt Toft—could he be the BT that menacing prediction specified?—in a municipal parking garage. Although Huldar’s been replaced as head of the CID and has precious little influence in the department anymore, he’s itching to work the case, and eventually he gets his wish, only to face the challenge of establishing that the case is indeed a case and not a cascade of unfortunate but unrelated events. Veterans of Sigurdardóttir’s peerlessly grim procedurals (The Legacy, 2018, etc.) will share the hero’s irrational conviction that all these dire portents are indeed related, and it’s not giving too much away to say that they’ll be proved shockingly correct.
More evidence of the author’s gift for establishing a web so dark and deep-laid that it hardly matters which particular spider wove it. You’re left agog at the detective’s concluding observation: “Sometimes violent instincts had to be given their head.”Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-13628-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | POLICE PROCEDURALS | INTERNATIONAL CRIME
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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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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Lady detective Bridie Devine searches for a missing child and finds much more than she bargained for.
Bridie Devine is no stranger to the seedy underworld of Victorian London. An accomplished detective with medical training, she sometimes helps the police by examining bodies to determine the cause of death. Bridie recently failed to find a lost child, and when she’s approached about another missing child, the daughter of Sir Edmund Berwick, she isn’t enthusiastic about taking on the case. But Christabel Berwick is no ordinary child. Sir Edmund has hidden Christabel away her whole life and wants Bridie to believe this is an ordinary kidnapping. Bridie does a little digging and learns that Christabel isn’t his daughter so much as his prized specimen. Sir Edmund believes Christabel is a “merrow,” a darker and less romanticized version of a mermaid. Bridie is skeptical, but there are reports of Christabel’s sharp teeth, color-changing eyes, and ability to drown people on dry land. Given that Bridie’s new companion is a ghost who refuses to tell her why he’s haunting her, Bridie might want to open her mind a bit. There’s a lot going on in this singular novel, and none of it pretty. Bridie’s London is soaked with mud and blood, and her past is nightmarish at best. Kidd (Mr. Flood’s Last Resort, 2018, etc.) is an expert at setting a supernatural mood perfect for ghosts and merrows, but her human villains make them seem mundane by comparison. With so much detail and so many clever, Dickensian characters, readers might petition Kidd to give Bridie her own series.
Creepy, violent, and propulsive; a standout gothic mystery.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2128-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | LITERARY FICTION | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | HISTORICAL MYSTERY
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