Well-written, character-driven portrait of small-town New England meets Silence of the Lambs. Strong stomach a plus.
A British novelist turned Maine police detective finds himself investigating a horrific murder.
Nichols follows up his innovative novel The Rocks (2015) with a more familiar type of thriller. In its opening scene we meet three teenage boys, gleefully skateboarding the nighttime streets of sleepy Granite Harbor. When Shane splits off from the group, an observer in a pickup truck rolls after him, a montage of images racing through his brain. “He was beneath the small blond girl riding him like a rocking horse....He was pinned to the ground as boys and girls spread their legs above him....In the woods with Ivan, the Master...[t]he hanging coyote was speaking his name....In his mouth he tasted the bitter pus....” Think we might have a serial killer on our hands? Very soon we will learn the horrific details of his murderous routine, as will Det. Alex Brangwen, the interesting Brit at the center of the novel’s large, well-developed ensemble cast. As Alex was beginning a successful writing career in the U.K.—he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize—his pregnant American wife, truly a bitch on wheels, insisted on moving home to have her baby. Maine, she decided, telling Alex it was beautiful, full of writers, and he’d love it there. But, unfortunately, things went south with both the marriage and his third novel, and he ended up working at the local police department, whose chief, Belinda “Billie” Raintree, had read his books and thought the skill set would translate. Now Shane’s desecrated body turns up on the grounds of the Settlement, a local archaeological site where many locals work as historic re-enactors, Goody this and Goodman that. Shane was a friend of Alex’s now-teenage daughter Sophie, and she and the other two skateboarders become even more alienated from their parents after the murder—particularly problematic because Mr. Weirdo still has them in his sights.
Well-written, character-driven portrait of small-town New England meets Silence of the Lambs. Strong stomach a plus.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250894816
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
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