An urgent, poignant, and terrifying thriller. More please.
Forensic psychologist Cyrus Haven returns in Robotham’s gripping follow-up to Good Girl, Bad Girl (2019).
Cyrus has finally tracked down Sacha Hopewell, the London special constable who carried little Evie Cormac out of a house of horrors seven years ago, where a man was tortured and killed trying to protect her. The little girl, whose true identity remains a mystery, was dubbed Angel Face and made a ward of the court; eventually she was given the name Evie and moved to Langford Hall, a secure children’s home. Meanwhile, Sacha and her family were threatened, and she eventually fled London. Cyrus hopes Sacha can shed light on what really happened to Evie in the days following her rescue and offers to take Sacha to see Evie, but she declines. Cyrus is then called to the scene of retired police officer Hamish Whitmore’s suspected suicide, where he finds evidence that suggests Whitmore was murdered. Cyrus advises his old friend Detective Lenny Parvel to treat the death as a homicide. Cyrus soon finds out that Whitmore had been investigating a series of child murders attributed to recently deceased pedophile Eugene Green, and, shockingly, the last name on his list is Angel Face. Whitmore’s family also reveals that a man with pale blue eyes and a half-moon scar, claiming to be police, had already questioned them. That’s no police officer, and it’s not long before Cyrus, with Sacha’s help, is racing to find out Evie’s true identity in a bid to save her from a powerful group of people who want her silenced at any cost. Once again, Robotham delves into some very (very) dark territory, and the horror steadily mounts as Evie, who has a strange ability to tell when people are lying, finally reveals what really happened to her before her rescue. Cyrus and Evie, both trauma survivors, are quirky, complex, and endlessly fascinating creations, and Robotham’s meticulously crafted tale is propelled by their alternating first-person narratives. Readers will be putty in this supremely talented author’s capable hands.
An urgent, poignant, and terrifying thriller. More please.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982103-63-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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