Review by New York Times Review
AS A WORLD-RENOWNED forensic pathologist, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the iron-willed protagonist of Patricia Cornwell's insanely popular procedural mysteries, is often called out of town for high-level professional consultations. That pattern is relaxed in CHAOS (Morrow/HarperCollins, $28.99), which finds Scarpetta at home with her husband, Benton Wesley, a criminal-intelligence agent for the F.B.I., and taking care of business as director of the Cambridge Forensic Center. Although she's hardly a lyrical writer, Cornwell allows her heroine a rare opportunity to express her affection for Boston, and especially for her favorite park along the Charles River. "I've been here many times," Scarpetta says, with some warmth, recalling hikes with Benton from their home near the Harvard campus in the "sublime" New England weather of the spring and fall. It doesn't seem fair, then, when a fresh-faced young woman with a British accent - someone Scarpetta and her husband had encountered earlier that day as she rode a bicycle through Cambridge - is found dead on the fitness path along the river. Because Boston is baking in a terrible heat wave, everything seems to be moving more slowly, so it takes half the book to set up a tent to secure the crime scene and allow Scarpetta to examine the corpse. "I'm getting more frustrated with each minute that passes," she fumes. "The body should be in the C.T. scanner. I should be setting up my autopsy station." Cornwell's readers should be able to relate to that. Not only is the autopsy a long time coming, it's less than interesting when Scarpetta finally gets around to it. Surprisingly, the young victim was zapped by a freak electrical charge - the same cause of death, it turns out, that claimed an Army general at the very same time, but hundreds of miles away. The possibility of "weaponized electricity" is the signal for the F.B.I. to step in, entering a plot that features a cyberstalker, a psycho from a previous book; Scarpetta's annoying sister, Dorothy; and Dorothy's brilliant, if seriously disturbed daughter, Lucy. Not one of them is dead and in need of an autopsy, which is a waste of Scarpetta's peculiar talents - and our time. AN ACT OF terrorism is unnerving in itself, but when this sort of violence takes the lives of children, rumblings of vigilante justice are often heard. That's the chaotic scene that greets Chief Inspector Bish Ortley in Melina Marchetta's TELL THE TRUTH, SHAME THE DEVIL (Mulholland/Little, Brown, $26) when he arrives in Calais to retrieve his daughter from a student tour of Normandy that ended abruptly when her bus was bombed and two people died. The French police are quick to suspect yet another student, Violette LeBrac Zidane, who comes from a family of terrorists. Marchetta, who has written several young adult novels, seems to have inside knowledge of the mysterious processes of the teenage brain. A busload of quarrelsome, immature adolescents doesn't daunt her in the least. Although they represent a bubbling melting pot of ethnicities, some with underlying political tensions, her young characters all stand out as individuals. Even at their most infuriating, they're always believable, if not as sympathetic as Bish Ortley, who carries a load of domestic problems on his shoulders. "There's something about him," Marchetta tells us. "The bloodshot eyes and sad teddy bear look. This man comes with a story." In HELL BAY (Minotaur, $25.99), Will Thomas puts a shrewd spin on the country house mystery by converting the traditional manor to a castle and shifting it to a remote location in the Isles of Scilly. ("The kingdom," according to legend, "where the faerie folk abandoned England, never to return.") Cyrus Barker, the series's diva detective, and his assistant, Thomas Llewelyn, who also serves as narrator, are working undercover at a high-stakes diplomatic meeting that the host, Lord Hargrave, attempts to camouflage as a house party. But on the very first night, Hargrave is shot dead by a sniper and a Sûreté agent with the French delegation is stabbed and thrown into the sea. When matters become really dire, the assembled guests decide to put on a show. ("It went rather well, considering the circumstances.") Thomas drops clever clues, and the setting is dramatic, but nothing beats the amateur entertainment organized by the guests, the murderer among them. EVERY ISLAND PARADISE has its resident eccentric. In Thomas Rydahl's first novel, THE HERMIT (Oneworld, $24.99), it's an OCtOgenarian Dane named Erhard, who has been living by himself for so long in the Canary Islands town of Puerto del Rosario that he's almost forgotten his native tongue. Erhard, who happens to be missing a finger, makes some money tuning pianos and driving a taxi. And when he comes across the mangled victim of a traffic accident, he snatches the man's detached finger for himself, a grim act that somehow "returns his balance to him." After a car is found on the beach with a dead baby in the back seat, the police bribe a young prostitute to play the troubled mother so they can close the case before the tourists get wind of it. But Erhard knows better, and he alone among his callous neighbors is determined to find the true killer. In K. E. Semmel's melancholy translation, this alienated old man proves to be a more complete human being than any of his 10-fingered friends.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 13, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Thomas tries his hand at a manor-house mystery in which characters are menaced by a killer in an isolated setting, usually at a country mansion with mixed results. In the eighth in the Barker & Llewelyn series, a clandestine conference between English and French government officials takes place on a remote island off Cornwall. Cyrus Barker and his hapless partner, Thomas Llewelyn, agree to act as security. A weeklong house party will theoretically provide smokescreen for the meeting. Lord Hargrave, host of the party, is killed by a sniper's bullet, which is just the beginning, as guests and members of the host family die suddenly and in surprising ways, for no apparent reason. Barker is stumped a situation unusual in the extreme and is peremptorily dismissed, although, of course, he never stops working the case. For fans, this somewhat predictable historical mystery assuredly builds on Barker's character and the partners' relationship, but it may prove disappointing for those who expect a more creative, intricate plot. Compares to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None and P. D. James' The Lighthouse, both also set on secluded islands.--Baker, Jen Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Godolphin Island, one of the Scilly isles off the tip of Cornwall, provides the isolated setting for Thomas's uneven eighth Victorian mystery (after 2015's Anatomy of Evil). Private detective Cyrus Barker and his sidekick, Thomas Llewelyn, set out for the island at the request of Lord Hargrave, who works for the Royal United Service Institution, which monitors other countries both politically and militarily. Hargrave is to meet with the French ambassador on Godolphin Island to try to resolve tensions between Britain and France over their respective African colonies. To keep the meeting secret, Hargrave has arranged a house party at his estate, and he retains Barker and Llewelyn to provide security for the ambassador. But soon after the detectives' arrival, a sniper fatally shoots Hargrave, and more shooting deaths follow at regular intervals. Despite the dramatic setup, Thomas fails to build much suspense, largely because there are numerous victims with only sketchy personalities. Many readers will identify the culprit early on. Agent: Maria Carvainis, Maria Carvainis Agency. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn travel to the Scilly Islands, off the tip of Cornwall, at the behest of the Royal United Service Institution, a think tank for Her Majesty's government. Representatives from France and England are meeting under the guise of a house party and protection is needed. But the bodies start falling, and Barker and Llewellyn are hard-pressed to keep everyone safe. This eighth in the series follows Anatomy of Evil. Great period writing. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A Victorian mystery that rewrites And Then There Were None with a very different ending.Lord Hargrave hires detective Cyrus Barker and his assistant, Thomas Llewelyn, to provide security for his secret meeting with French Ambassador Michel Gascoigne to discuss a new treaty. The meeting will be disguised as a house party at Hargraves home on Godolphin Island in the Isles of Scilly. Barkers cover will be provided by his lady friend, Philippa Ashleigh, a close friend of Lady Barker. The island has no telephone, only a red flag to run up a pole when help is required. Aside from the two detectives, the Hargraves, their daughter and two sons, and the ambassador, the party includes his lordships doctor and his two daughters; Delacroix, the ambassadors bodyguard; the Honorable Algernon Kerry, an unpleasant old family friend recently returned from South America; Lady Alicia Travers; Colonel and Mrs. Fraser; and some 15 servants. On the first night, Hargrave is shot dead by an expert marksman, the ferry that brought the ambassador is sent away by a faked note, and Delacroix is found stabbed. Although the assassin has many opportunities to kill at will, he seems to be highly selective. A search of the island reveals only that the flag to call for help has been destroyed and the rifle used to kill Hargrave was stolen from his gun cabinet, suggesting an inside connection. Blamed for not protecting Hargrave, Barker and Llewelyn are frozen out but continue to hunt for clues to the killer. The preferred targets, members of the Hargrave family, lead Barker to suspect that the motive may be personal rather than an international conspiracy to stop the treaty. Thomas (Anatomy of Evil, 2015, etc.) supplies plenty of suspects and red herrings, ratcheting up the tension steadily as he winnows the targets to make this period adventure one of his best. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
