A richly rendered story of murder on the shores of Lake Michigan.
Stander’s Michigan detective takes on a summertime double homicide in this crime novel, the 12th in a series.
During the Fourth of July weekend, the lake shores of Cedar County in northern Michigan fill with what the locals refer to as “summer people.” For Sheriff Ray Elkins, the holiday usually means firework injuries and a few DUIs. This year, however, he’s got a grisly double murder to contend with: a naked couple killed in flagrante delicto near the beach. The male victim, a man of around 30, has tattoos and a history of cocaine use. The female, a girl in her teens, bears evidence of a history of malnourishment and physical abuse. Authorities manage to identify the latter as Tammy Ogden, a troubled local girl well known to Child and Family Services, but the identity of the man remains mysterious. Which of the dead was the intended target of the murder, and why? Elkins and his team—including his live-in girlfriend Detective Sergeant Sue Lawrence—will have to wade into the less sightly corners of their resort area, where poverty, drug use, and gang activity are facts of life. Stander’s prose reveals a keen eye not just for crime scenes but for the landscape itself: “Ray looked left toward the Manitous as they motored north following the shoreline a quarter of a mile from the beach. The island’s upper topography was clearly outlined against the sky. The steep waves obscured the lower half, giving the illusion that they were floating above the water.” The author writes with great compassion for his characters, who feel as lived-in as the world they inhabit—they’re victims of long histories that have carried them, inevitably, to these crimes. Not as fast-paced or formulaic as many works in the genre, this thoughtful tale should please long-term fans of the series and new readers alike.
A richly rendered story of murder on the shores of Lake Michigan.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2024
ISBN: 9780997570175
Page Count: 260
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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