A fun, inventive murder mystery set on a wintry Atlantic island.
A woman with a perfect memory must solve a murder at the center of a wealthy, dysfunctional family in Giebfried and Wells’ mystery, the first in a series.
It’s 1955, and Alexandra Durant’s final year of graduate school isn’t going according to plan. First, she’s kicked out of her psychology program less than a year before completing her dissertation. (The reason? Not being “likable” enough.) Then she’s offered the chance to reenroll—but only if she does a favor for her professor, John Marlowe. Marlowe hires Alexandra to work as a maid for his mother for one month at the sprawling mansion on the family’s private island off Maine’s coast. It’s a strange request, but Alexandra needs to graduate, and the money John offers her will pay for her own mother’s medical treatment. Alexandra arrives on Exeter Island to find things not quite as John described them. First of all, his mother is dead! Her six children and their significant others—all of them quite odd—have descended on the island along with an estranged friend of the family named Isidore Lennox, whose presence causes quite the stir. At least the estate will be easy to sort out. John, the oldest, will inherit everything. Then John is murdered, leaving each of the 12 people on the island a possible suspect. Everyone is suspicious of one another. The only one Alexandra can trust is herself. Luckily, she has spent years developing a photographic memory—indeed, memory is the topic of her dissertation—making her the perfect sleuth to get to the bottom of the crime. She’ll need to hurry. Several of her housemates may be much more dangerous than they initially seemed. In solving his murder, maybe Alexandra can figure out the other mystery that’s been bothering her: Why did John hire her to be his mother’s maid the day after his mother died?
Giebfried and Wells deliver a wonderfully atmospheric murder mystery on foggy, snowbound Exeter Island. The location makes the lead’s circumstances feel even more remote and dangerous, while the incessant bickering of the surviving Marlowes creates an almost unbearable claustrophobia. The prose is exact and attuned to Alexandra’s analytical perspective. Here, before he dies, John gives her instructions for navigating the strange scenario involving multiple overbearing personalities: “Now, you’ll be thrown into certain situations while you’re here, and—like a good psychologist—you need to react appropriately. No judgment. No criticism. Nothing makes you uncomfortable. Understand?” The novel is a long one at over 500 pages, and its shifts in tone—moving easily from suspense to humor to horror to satire—keep the reader from ever getting too comfortable. Alexandra’s virtuosic memory and poor people skills make her a delightful detective, and the people around her provide an endless series of foils. The twists keep coming all the way to a satisfying ending. Perhaps the most exciting development is the promise of future Alexandra Durant cases to come.
A fun, inventive murder mystery set on a wintry Atlantic island.Pub Date: April 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-09-958711-5
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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