A suspenseful tale that effectively combines the power dynamics of South Jersey with terrifying natural threats.
Police detective Mickey Cleary’s investigation of a suspicious kidnapping leads her to danger-filled Crab Island in this seventh book in Waters’ mystery series.
It’s 1979, and Mickey, who was Surf City’s chief of police and is now Long Beach Island’s “one and only detective,” is in a helicopter above the southern New Jersey shoreline. The pilot is Claude Stellwag, who, like her recently deceased husband, is a Vietnam War veteran; he’s also one of her two current suitors. They fly over Crab Island, which features “the twisted timbers and ghostly girders of the once-bustling Fish Factory, known to generations of locals, tourists, fishermen and clammers as the Stinkhouse.” Mickey sees a flash of light coming from the now-abandoned island; this triggers her cop instincts, which she initially ignores. The narrative unfolds in chapters that share thethird-personviewpoints of several key players, by turns. Mickey soon returns to Crab Island with Claude; her other suitor, boat restorer Helly Hansen; and feisty secretary-turned-investigator Genetha Ralstonin tow. Gregory “The Pope” Devine, a man with “big money and a lot of political juice,” asks her to find his son Barry, who went missing a few hours after lunching with Ilsa Schoenweiss, the new CEO of Atlantic City’s Bombay Hotel & Casino. Mickey smells a setup, and, indeed, she ends up having a showdown with Devine’s operatives on Crab Island. She also deals with bumbling youths whose scheme to illegally import supersized coconut crabs goes terribly awry, andeven encounters a hurricane.
South Jersey native Waters packs a lot of wild action and home-state color into this rollicking crime thriller. The story plays out as an entertaining mashup of Elmore Leonard-–sque goon-squad shenanigans and extraordinary Jurassic Park–and Twister-type battles with nature. Over the course of the narrative, the author makes pit stops to opine on Bruce Springsteen’s music, “convenient disappearances” in the notorious Pine Barrens, and the quality of mob-joint pizza. “Adventures were one thing, but the last eighteen hours had been unlike anything she’d ever experienced,” wisecracking Genetha appropriately muses to herself near the end of this novel; at one point, for instance, she and Mickey find themselves perched high upon a shaky ladder on the island’s water tower to escape hurricane flooding. (This prompts their male cohorts to dub them Supergirl and Catwoman.) Along the way, Waters skillfully withholds information from readers and executes slow reveals to great dramatic effect, often employing cliffhanger chapter endings. Mysterious island creatures, for example, are introduced with “a scritching kind of sound—something between scraping and scratching” before readers get to witness their gory impact. The author does an admirable job of weaving elements of Mickey’s complex backstory into the proceedings. However, when the detective is forced to flee at the end of the novel, it feels rather abrupt, and the impetus for her flight is a bit unclear. Presumably, an upcoming installment will clarify such matters.
A suspenseful tale that effectively combines the power dynamics of South Jersey with terrifying natural threats.Pub Date: May 1, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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