![]() 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. First of a series.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. ![]() Wassmer’s main contributions to the familiar village murder-cum-not-quite-romance formula are a strong sense of atmosphere-the town is much more vivid than its individual inhabitants-and a keen eye for the places where everyday frictions between perfectly nice people shade off into something altogether darker. Even taken together, the two don’t add up to much of a sleuthing team, and readers looking for the pleasures of an old-school whodunit are likely to find this one slow to get started and rushed at the end. ![]() As McGuire and Pearl debate how to parse the evidence, Pearl can’t help but notice that the conveniently widowed McGuire, who’s still grieving the fiancee he lost a year ago, is a most attractive figure of a man. DCI Mike McGuire, recently transferred from the Met to the Canterbury CID, is far from convinced that Vinnie was murdered, but the death very shortly afterward of Stroud himself offers a powerful new argument. After sorting out Phillip Caffery’s missing dog and refusing Doug Stroud’s request to check up on Vincent Rowe, the fisherman Stroud has loaned money to to help reseed the shrinking oyster beds, she lands a doozy of a third case when she goes to Vinnie’s boat to warn him that Stroud is on the warpath and finds her longtime friend dead in the water, an anchor chain wrapped around his ankle. So she returns to law enforcement-not as the police officer she was before Charlie arrived but as a private investigator. The Whitstable Pearl, the seafood restaurant she owns and operates, doesn’t come close to absorbing all her energy. Now that Charlie, the son she’s raised without a husband, has left for Kent University in Canterbury, Pearl Nolan is restless. A debut novel from British TV writer Wassmer ( More Than Just Coincidence, 2010) set in an English seacoast town where life would be perfect if it weren’t for the murders.
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