A strong effort by one of crime fiction’s go-to writers.
Two male victims of parental abuse and two female victims of sex trafficking converge on a small island off the coast of Maine following the killing of seven men on a yacht.
Israel Pike, having served 15 years in prison for killing his abusive father, becomes a prime suspect in the yacht murders after discovering the bodies, which include those of two candidates for U.S. Senate. Running off to hide from his own brutal father, 12-year-old Lyman Rankin discovers a frightened young woman lying low in a former neighbor’s abandoned house. She proves to have a crucial connection to the killings. The odds of anyone good coming out of this mess alive, or anyone bad getting punished for their deeds, are not high. The island, Salvation Point, is controlled by Israel’s uncle, Sterling, a corrupt deputy sheriff who owns half the town and, along with his late brother, was involved in running underage girls up and down the East Coast. One of their early victims was 14-year-old Jenn Salazar, now a state cop with a secret agenda. There’s a whole lot of abuse going on here—more than one novel can comfortably contain. The twin narratives can get pretty schematic. But having written two of his previous three novels under the pseudonym Scott Carson, Koryta seems recharged by the dark human themes, the stormy coastal setting (no crime writer makes more of the great outdoors), and the ugly politics. As in real life, the upcoming election here has great significance to the nation. Having created memorable outsize villains in such books as The Prophet (2012) and Those Who Wish Me Dead (2014), Koryta chills the air with smaller-than-life bad guys.
A strong effort by one of crime fiction’s go-to writers.Pub Date: July 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780316535946
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.
The loss of her police officer father and the discovery of an abandoned car in a local lake raise chilling questions regarding a young woman’s family history.
When Hazel Sharp returns to her hometown of Mirror Lake, North Carolina, for her father’s memorial, she and the other townspeople are confronted by a challenging double whammy: As they’re grieving the loss of beloved longtime police officer Detective Perry Holt, a disturbing sight appears in the lake, whose waterline is receding because of an ongoing drought—an old, unidentifiable car, which has likely been lurking there for years. Hazel temporarily leaves her Charlotte-based building-renovation business in the capable hands of her partners and reconnects with her brothers, Caden and Gage; her Uncle Roy; her old fling and neighbor, Nico; and her schoolfriend, Jamie, now a mother and married to Caden. Tiny, relentless suspicions rise to the metaphorical surface along with that waterlogged vehicle: There have been a slew of minor break-ins; two people go missing; and then, a second abandoned car is discovered. The novel digs deeper into Hazel’s family history—her father was a widow when he married Hazel’s mother, who later left the family, absconding with money and jewels—and Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation: “Everything mattered disproportionately in a small town. Your success, but also your failure. Everyone knows might as well have been our town motto.”
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668010440
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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