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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After a flight in fantasy with When the Wind Blows (1998), Patterson goes to ground with another slash-and-squirm psychokiller page-turner, this one dedicated to “the millions of Alex Cross readers, who so frequently ask, can’t you write faster?” By day, Geoffrey Shafer is a charming, 42-year-old British Embassy paper-pusher with a picture-perfect family and a shady past as an MI-6 secret agent. Come sundown, he swallows a pharmacy of psychoactive pills, gulps three black coffees loaded with sugar, and roams the streets of Washington, D.C., in a battered cab, where, disguised as a black man, he rolls dice to determine which among his black female fares he—ll murder. Afterwards he dumps his naked victims in crime-infested back alleys of black- slum neighborhoods, then sends e-mails boasting of his accomplishments to three other former MI-6 agents involved in a hellish Internet role-playing game. “I sensed I was at the start of another homicide mess,” sighs forensic-psychologist turned homicide-detective Alex Cross. Cross yearns to catch the “Jane Doe murderer” but is thwarted by Det. Chief George Pittman, who assigns sexy Det. Patsy Hampton to investigate Cross and come up with a reason for dismissing him. Meanwhile, Cross’s fiancÇe is kidnaped during a Bermuda vacation, and an anonymous e-mail warns him to back off. He doesn’t, of course, and just when it appears that Patterson is sleep-walking through his story, Cross nabs Shafer minutes after Shafer kills Det. Hampton. During the subsequent high-visibility trail, Shafer manages to make the jury believe that he’s innocent and that Cross was trying to frame him. When all seems lost, a sympathetic British intelligence chief offers to help Cross bring down Shafer, and the other homicidal game-players, during a showdown on the breezy beaches of Jamaica. Kinky mayhem, a cartoonish villain, regular glimpses of the kindly Cross caring for his loved ones, and an ending that spells a sequel: Patterson’s fans couldn’t ask for more.
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-69328-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | POLICE PROCEDURALS | THRILLER
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