If you can overlook the comic-strip prose and by-the-numbers plotting, the hero is appealingly fallible—he’s still carrying...
Daily News reporter Gil Malloy’s third outing pits him against a serial killer who’s also a member of the fairer sex.
Fairer but not gentler. Melissa Ross, the private eye Victoria Issacs hired to check up on her husband, Walter, a prominent corporate attorney, goes the extra mile, taking Walter to bed in the posh Hotel Madison, then stabbing and bashing him to death. She gives ad executive Rick Faris the same treatment in his Yorkville apartment, then moves on to Tim Hammacher, the top aide to crime-fighting deputy mayor Bob Wylie. Gil can’t help taking these developments personally because he’d catapulted to fame, then slid to disgrace, over a story he filed about Victoria Issacs when she was a high-class call girl who called herself Houston and because Wylie had approached him to join Hammacher on a team that seemed headed for a mayoral bid. And soon enough, Melissa, whom the News has dubbed Blonde Ice, is indicating that it’s just as personal for her by phoning him to taunt him, feed him clues, and revel in her superior brainpower. All this seems obvious, right down to Gil’s jokes, and Belsky does seem to have a perverse attraction to all the lines more oblique writers make a point of leaving out. But the case takes a welcome new turn when Melissa turns up in Ohio under circumstances that broadly hint that she may not be the killer after all, and Gil goes back to the drawing board, eventually joining forces with NYPD rookie Vincent D’Nolfo, former bodyguard to the slain Abbie Kincaid (Shooting for the Stars, 2015, etc.), to catch Blonde Ice in the middle of her latest media event.
If you can overlook the comic-strip prose and by-the-numbers plotting, the hero is appealingly fallible—he’s still carrying a torch for his ex, and he spends a fair amount of time temporizing and procrastinating—and there are some effective twists toward the end.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-501-12978-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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