Case #3 for alcoholic Cajun ex-cop Dave Robicheaux (The Neon Rain, Heaven's Prisoners) sends him and his adoptive daughter Alafair to Montana on a quest for the usual justice and revenge. Robicheaux is never exactly likable, but you can't help feeling for the guy. While he's still troubled by dreams about his wife Annie, gunned down by dopesters in Heaven's Prisoners, his lowlife old friend Dixie Lee Pugh turns up in New Iberia with a tale about two men killed in Montana over an oil lease. The next thing you know, Dave—whose father has been killed on an oil rig 20 years before—finds himself asking questions about Dalton Vidrine and Harry Mapes, the alleged killers. When his mail brings a particularly nasty threat about daughter Alafair, he goes after Vidrine and Mapes with a tire chain—and next morning he's arrested for Vidrine's murder. Mortgaging his house and bait-shop to post bail, Dave takes off for Montana, looking for evidence that'll spring him from jail and put Mapes inside. What author Burke lacks in subtlety—Dave's investigative technique includes badgering drug-agent Dan Nygurski; rebuffing his old partner Cletus Purcel and (separately) Clete's Indian girlfriend Darlene American Horse; cold-shouldering Alathir's helpful schoolteacher Tess Regan, and insulting and beating mobster Sally Dio in front of his hangers-on—he makes up in a brooding sense of menace: Dave and his friends—not to mention his many enemies—are so violent that you repeatedly expect the worst, and Burke rarely lets you down. When Dave eventually vindicates himself by setting Sally and Mapes against each other, his triumph seems not only implausible but downright miraculous. Though his prose is as overmuscled as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Burke tells an evocative and compelling story of a good man's struggle With the vigilante inside him.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1989
ISBN: 0380712040
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1989
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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