A tantalizing puzzle starring a truly lovable protagonist.
Framed for murder, an optimistic social outcast must prove his innocence.
As the book opens, the collapse of a rugged hillside in Normandy reveals a trio of skeletons who seem to have died in the same place but at different times. Then we flash back to five months earlier, as Jamal Salaoui is attempting to climb “the highest cliff in Europe.” As a Muslim, he’s been a scapegoat his entire life. At the Saint Antoine Therapeutic Institute of Bagnolet, where he works, he’s often unfairly accused of neglecting his teenage clients. When he spots a distressed young woman dangerously close to the cliff’s edge, he’s unable to stop her from leaping to her death. At this point, Jamal, now accused of murder, takes over the narrative. After he ventures down to examine the body, things become more complicated. A woman named Denise and her male companion, whom Jamal dubs Xanax, arrive, eyeing him suspiciously. They’re soon followed by laconic police captain Piroz. A cursory look at the dead woman reveals that she’s naked under her coat and that she’s been raped and that someone had also tried to strangle her. Then an anonymous person mails him newspaper clippings, case notes, and witness statements at the hotel where he's staying, seemingly about the tragedy on the cliff, but when he looks more closely he sees that the article is a decade old. A second flashback spotlights this earlier, identical crime, also investigated by Piroz. As evidence piles up against him, Jamal and intrepid postdoctoral fellow Mona use their wits and the internet to ferret out the real killer. Bussi creates a devilish nesting-doll plot that involves a sudokulike number square, ghosts, and surprising family connections.
A tantalizing puzzle starring a truly lovable protagonist.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60945-612-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: World Noir
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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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