The unfolding mystery—not the characters—will keep readers interested in this dark tale.
Mystery novelist Simpson (A Debt of Death, 2008, etc.) weaves a twist-filled tale of deception about a young wife who disappears at a mall in upstate New York.
Like Gillian Flynn’s best-selling Gone Girl (2012), this novel begins with the disappearance of a young wife. Rebecca vanishes while she and her husband, Liam, are shopping at the Bennett Mall in Cheektowaga, N.Y., near Buffalo, just months after they married. At first, Rebecca’s disappearance looks like an abduction, but the issue becomes murkier as the novel fills in the background on the newlyweds’ relationship. The couple met at a medical conference in Florida; in passages about those first encounters, readers feel that Rebecca is playing Liam from the start. She agrees with him perhaps too readily and, as she entices him sexually, avoids talking about her past. Why does she do it? What’s her game? These questions lie at the heart of the novel but never become as urgent as they should. Both members of the couple are so self-absorbed that readers don’t feel the love between them in a way that would make Liam’s reactions to Rebecca’s disappearance poignant. Liam has tense confrontations with a security guard and with the police after his wife vanishes, which help keep the plot moving swiftly but don’t answer basic questions about his character: Does he really miss Rebecca? Or is he, not Rebecca, playing a role? Even if the characters remain flat, however, the story has a full-throttle pace that maintains interest. Simpson also structures the novel as a series of date-stamped sections that help readers keep track of events. The writing is clean but sometimes has redundancies: “Peters would have been able to avoid the kick and disarm Sven in one motion had the old man’s move not come as such a surprise that it caught Peters completely off guard.” The novel contains strong language but nothing unfamiliar to readers who watch R-rated thrillers.
The unfolding mystery—not the characters—will keep readers interested in this dark tale.Pub Date: May 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475266603
Page Count: 220
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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