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.
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. 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.
The ground has been laid well for future incidents in the professional and intimate life of Charlotte Holmes.įor fans of etiquette-flouting heroines who desire truth while being true to their desires-gastronomic, romantic, and cerebral.Īnother sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.Ī 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.
The mystery itself is conducted long distance and through a trick necessitated by the gender-flipping while competently handled, its intricacy is less gripping than the gradual reveal of a new Holmes-ian world and its inhabitants. There is also a tantalizing, slow-burn love story between Holmes and a longtime friend befitting Thomas' skills as a romance novelist. Holmes herself is cast in the mold of the recent television incarnations of Conan Doyle’s savant as well as Deanna Raybourn’s detectives, Lady Julia Grey and Veronica Speedwell-with an added devotion to food that lends her an unexpected charm. The novel is peopled with characters who warm the reader with a glow of recognition-Watson, Lestrade, Mycroft, and Moriarty all appear in some form-but Thomas also imbues them with personalized histories and characteristics. Weaving them together is amateur sleuth Charlotte Holmes, who is also an inadvertent participant in them due to a social catastrophe she precipitated for personal reasons. The novel begins in 1886 England with the foreshadowing of a suspicious death, but the incident is only one of many seemingly unrelated events that form a pattern over the succeeding chapters. Gender bending is just the first sign that unusual happenings are afoot in this origin story for a revamped Sherlock Holmes series by bestselling author Thomas ( The Perilous Sea, 2015, etc.). What if the word’s most famous (and eccentric) Victorian detective were a young gentlewoman in the midst of a scandal?
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