Paints a lively picture of Austen-family dynamics that offers little insight into the writer Jane will become.
Murder rattles the close-knit Austen family.
The winter before she turns 20 seems promising for young Jane Austen. Her flirtation with Irish law student Tom Lefroy has grown more serious, and she hopes the announcement of Jonathan Harcourt’s betrothal to Sophy Rivers, which she anticipates hearing at the Harcourts’ ball, will prompt young Tom to ask for her hand. But the festivities end abruptly when a chambermaid finds the body of a young woman stashed in a laundry closet. The late Madame Renault, a merchant from overseas who sold hats in the Basingstoke market, was clearly killed by a blow to the head. But it’s much less clear who wielded the heavy metal pan. At Lord Harcourt’s urging, Magistrate Richard Craven first blames vagabonds living on the Harcourt estate. When no vagrants are found, Craven’s eyes shift toward George Austen, Jane’s intellectually disabled older brother. Georgy’s come into possession of a gold and seed pearl chain belonging to Madame Renault, and even though Craven knows that the nonverbal young man is an unlikely killer, he charges him with grand larceny, a capital crime. The Austens can’t decide which fate would be worst for Georgy: allowing him to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, a plea that would consign him to an asylum for the rest of his life; throwing him on the mercy of the court in hope that he’d be transported to Australia, where he would certainly be unable to care for himself; or allowing him to be hanged. If Jane can identify the real killer, however, the court will have to release her brother, and Madame Renault will receive the justice she deserves.
Paints a lively picture of Austen-family dynamics that offers little insight into the writer Jane will become.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781454951803
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Union Square & Co.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
Speculators who haven’t been put off by bitcoin’s recent crash will enjoy this walk—well, run—on the wild side.
Cotton Malone, who just can’t stay retired from international intrigue, joins the mad dance of competitors for a fortune in bitcoin.
So many people have forgotten about the horde of gold the retreating Japanese hid on Luzon Island in the Philippines that it’s not at all clear who has legal title to it. That’s perfect for Robert Citrone, the retired CIA overseer of the Black Eagle Trust, which has used the gold to fund covert operations around the world. Just as Derrick Koger, the European station chief for the CIA, is pulling Malone away from his Copenhagen bookstore to help him investigate possible misdeeds swirling around Luxembourg’s Bank of St. George and its ruthless chief operating officer, Catherine Gledhill, other interested parties turn up in often surprising connections. Freelance assassin Kyra Lhota executes Armenian oligarch Samvel Yerevan and moves on to her next target. Malone’s sometime lover Cassiopeia Vitt is snatched by high-ranking Japanese security chief Aiko Ejima. His former lover Suzy Baldwin resurfaces as Kelly Austin, BSG’s director of special technology, who’s concealing secrets from Malone and the rest of the world. They’re all on the trail of a fabulous cache of bitcoin that in the absence of any legal records of ownership will belong, like the Luzon gold, to anyone who can track it down and grab it. The grandly scaled complications that follow feature countless broken alliances and the deaths of a fearsome number of nonfranchise characters. An extended author’s note explains what’s historically accurate (quite a bit, as it turns out) and what’s fabricated (quite a bit more).
Speculators who haven’t been put off by bitcoin’s recent crash will enjoy this walk—well, run—on the wild side.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781538721032
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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