An often humorous mystery that winningly portrays a very particular time and place.
In Johnson’s crime novel set in the late 1990s, an inexperienced private eye in New York City unexpectedly gets mixed up in multiple murders.
It’s 1998, and 20-something Nico Kelly is a licensed PI who does mundane work for a lawyer named Finch, shadowing city employees suspected of committing insurance fraud. Specifically, he surveils supposedly injured workers, trying to catch them performing suspiciously vigorous activities. Nico’s personal life is also dismal. His father, once an “open-mic popular” musician, died of an overdose a few years ago, and he’s lost contact with his Ecuadorian mother, although he still sees his aunt, Cookie. Everything changes when Nico, on a routine job, gets videotaped footage of a cop’s murder by two fellow officers. Finch suggests giving the VHS tape to a former member of a police-corruption committee. After another murder, the officer assigned to the case, Detective Hong, looks at them as suicides, but Nico isn’t convinced—especially after his video camera is stolen from his apartment. Next, someone close to Cookie dies under strange circumstances, and she begs Nico to find out what happened. Now he’s doing “real PI shit,” including breaking into buildings and creating a fake identity, but his investigation may not yield the answers he wants. Johnson ably gives his story a vivid sense of atmosphere. Nico’s world is gritty but cool, populated with establishments like the Doray, a tavern with a black interior and exterior; the 24-hour record shop Accidental Records; and “self-aware” bar Max Fish, all sharing space with ever-present rats, cockroaches, and garbage; characters eat New York staples such as pizza and bialys. Johnson skillfully imbues it all with a clear sense of the time, when Rudy Guiliani was New York’s mayor; one character is convinced a Y2K computer meltdown is imminent, and Nico uses old tech like pagers and pay phones. Although the story centers on a navigation of societal corruption, the witty dialogue throughout and underachiever Nico’s wry narration (“I sort of got shot”) counteract the darkness, ultimately giving readers a cautious sense of hope.
An often humorous mystery that winningly portrays a very particular time and place.Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9798218524012
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.
On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family.
When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family, hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed.
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593875551
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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