Juxtaposing the lives of ordinary people and the seriously rich enhances this thorny tale of love, hate, and murder.
A series of horrific and inexplicable attacks on women provide a reporter a chance to solve yet another murder among the aristocrats of 1901 Rhode Island.
Though she still lives in Newport, journalist Emma Cross Andrews left society reporting behind to pursue other stories after she married wealthy newspaper owner Derrick Andrews. On the one hand, Emma’s been reluctantly accepted by the Four Hundred as a relative of Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt. On the other, her long-standing friendship with Newport Police Detective Jesse Whyte has involved her in many upper-crust murders. A luncheon at Vinland, a Viking-inspired mansion, in support of the Audubon Society attracts Second Lady Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and the cream of Newport society, who in deference to the Audubon supporters have forgone their usual extravagantly feathered hats. At the luncheon, where she detects undercurrents of tension, Emma meets Amity Carter and her niece, Zinnia Lewis, newly arrived from Florida and friends of Vinland owner Florence Twombly. Amity has recently inherited the empty property next door to Emma’s, which she and Derrick have been hoping to buy; they want to build a new house there and turn her family home into a school. Delighted to learn that Amity approves their plans, Emma invites her and Zinnia to leave their hotel and stay in her guest room until they return to Florida. Things work out less well for luncheon guest Lottie Robinson, who has apparently been poisoned by an unidentified toxin delivered in petit fours and is not expected to survive. As other poisonings follow, Emma investigates a collection of motives ranging from broken engagements to insufficient devotion to protecting wildlife.
Juxtaposing the lives of ordinary people and the seriously rich enhances this thorny tale of love, hate, and murder.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781496736215
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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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