The resolute avoidance of anything that smacks of exposition slows the pace to a crawl and makes it hard to sift the wheat...
Under all the massive weight of circumstance and suffering, the latest case for the sorely tried Tanumshede police is a tale of mothers and their children.
The people of Fjällbacka call Gråskär “Ghost Island” because of long-standing rumors that “those who died out there never leave.” But after the violent death of her overbearing husband, Fredrik, whose status as a wine importer merely provided a cover for his criminal activities, Nathalie Wester retreats there gratefully with her 5-year-old son, Sam, secure in the knowledge that Gråskär is her island, their island. The friends and neighbors in Fjällbacka who have yet to discover Fredrik’s body have little time to worry about Nathalie’s welfare because they have troubles of their own. The town’s finance officer, Mats Sverin, has been shot to death in the front hall of his own apartment, and his ancient status as Nathalie’s high school boyfriend seems a lot less relevant to Patrik Hedström, of the Tanum police, than his recent beating by a gang of toughs in Göteborg, where he’d worked for the Refuge, a battered women’s shelter, before returning to his hometown. And the family of Patrik’s wife, author Erica Falck, has sorrows of its own. Erica’s younger sister, Anna, has been badly injured in a car crash and has lost the child she’d carried nearly to term—a boy she’d hoped would knit her family closer together with that of Dan, her second husband. Now every mother and child on whom Läckberg turns her searching eye, from Mats’ mother, Signe Sverin, to Madeleine, a Refuge client who finds that Copenhagen isn’t far enough from Sweden to flee her tormenter, is withdrawn, isolated, and endangered.
The resolute avoidance of anything that smacks of exposition slows the pace to a crawl and makes it hard to sift the wheat from the chaff but also gives this glum tale a certain majesty.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-681-77204-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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