The author deftly juggles past and present and a wide range of viewpoints until the sadly predictable big reveal.
Debut novelist Finlay throws every last plague at a Job-like Nebraska family, and most of them stick.
The troubles began seven years ago, when Danny Pine was accused of killing Charlotte Rose, the high school girlfriend who’d just discovered her pregnancy. Prosecutors swiftly convicted Danny on the basis of a confession the local cops bullied out of him, and although A Violent Nature, a Netflix documentary series, suggested that the real killer was Bobby Ray Hayes, the Smasher convicted of beating several other girls to death, it didn’t change the minds of the Pines’ neighbors in Adair, turning the family into celebrity pariahs. Taking his family from Nebraska to Chicago, Danny's father, Evan Pine, has worked ever since at another branch of the accounting firm Marconi LLP. Just a few weeks after he’s laid off, however, comes the most crushing blow of all: On a trip to Mexico, Evan, his wife, Olivia, and their two youngest children, Maggie and Tommy, are all found dead, apparently from a gas leak in their cabin. FBI agent Sarah Keller, who’s had her eye on Marconi for quite a while, wants to know why Evan was found outside the cabin; whether that red splotch near him is his own blood or someone else’s; why the Pines decided to celebrate Evan’s joblessness by taking a family vacation; and how all these developments are connected to the murder of Charlotte Rose. In search of answers, she leans on Danny, who refuses to talk, and on Danny’s brother Matt, an NYU film student surrounded by people he can’t trust who feels his family’s history converging on him like a pack of hungry wolves.
The author deftly juggles past and present and a wide range of viewpoints until the sadly predictable big reveal.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2502-6882-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.
The master of supernatural disaster returns with four horror-laced novellas.
The protagonist of the title story, Holly Gibney, is by King’s own admission one of his most beloved characters, a “quirky walk-on” who quickly found herself at the center of some very unpleasant goings-on in End of Watch, Mr. Mercedes, and The Outsider. The insect-licious proceedings of the last are revisited, most yuckily, while some of King’s favorite conceits turn up: What happens if the dead are never really dead but instead show up generation after generation, occupying different bodies but most certainly exercising their same old mean-spirited voodoo? It won’t please TV journalists to know that the shape-shifting bad guys in that title story just happen to be on-the-ground reporters who turn up at very ugly disasters—and even cause them, albeit many decades apart. Think Jack Torrance in that photo at the end of The Shining, and you’ve got the general idea. “Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same,” King writes, “and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard.” In the careful-what-you-wish-for department, Rat is one of those meta-referential things King enjoys: There are the usual hallucinatory doings, a destiny-altering rodent, and of course a writer protagonist who makes a deal with the devil for success that he thinks will outsmart the fates. No such luck, of course. Perhaps the most troubling story is the first, which may cause iPhone owners to rethink their purchases. King has gone a far piece from the killer clowns and vampires of old, with his monsters and monstrosities taking on far more quotidian forms—which makes them all the scarier.
Vintage King: a pleasure for his many fans and not a bad place to start if you’re new to him.Pub Date: April 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3797-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
The lavish food descriptions and appended recipes are the best parts of this anemic mystery.
Christmas is coming, but so is trouble for South Lick, Indiana.
Robbie Jordan, owner and chief cook at Pans ’N Pancakes, returns from solving a murder in California just in time for the holiday rush, which is complicated more than most Christmastimes by a number of surprises that disrupt her circle of friends. First, her assistant, Danna Beedle, gets a visit from Marcus Vandemere, a young biracial man claiming to be her half brother, an assertion that thrills Danna despite the doubts of some friends and relatives. Next comes a fire that nearly destroys the home of anesthesiologist Dr. William Geller, a racist whose wife, Tina, reportedly left him years ago. When a skeleton turns up in the attic, the not-so-esteemed doctor has some explaining to do. Robbie’s nemesis, Detective Octavia Slade, who recently married Robbie’s former boyfriend, is more willing than usual to accept help from Robbie, who has a knack for finding things out. The next to die is Tina’s twin, Toni, who knew Marcus from karate classes. Toni’s husband is the prime suspect, but Robbie’s convinced the fatalities are connected. With help from her boyfriend and her network of friends, she attempts to clear things up before the killer spoils her holiday by adding her to his list.
The lavish food descriptions and appended recipes are the best parts of this anemic mystery.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2317-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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