A relentless nail-biter whether below or above the waterline. Even the setbacks are suspenseful.
A chance discovery in an alligator-infested pond sets diver Sloan McPherson, of Florida’s Underwater Investigation Unit, on the path of a monstrous serial killer.
Tasked with retrieving a corpse from a car that’s run into Pond 65, Sloan dodges the resident amphibians long enough to emerge successful. In the process, she finds something far more horrifying: a sunken van that a more extended second dive reveals is the final resting place of four teenagers who vanished 30 years ago. It would be bad enough if their deaths were the result of reckless acting out, but it looks more and more like murder times four. Informed of Sloan’s discovery by her boss, UIU head George Solar, the victims’ parents act out their grief by yelling at each other as Sloan watches, eager to move on. But although Florida’s waterways offer apparently endless riches for underwater investigations, this case won’t let her go. Ethan Rafferty, a schoolmate who hung out with the four victims half a lifetime ago, fingers a possible perpetrator: Sleazy Steve, who he’s pretty sure got possessed by a demon they were all pursuing. The further along the trail to Sleazy Steve Sloan and Scott Hughes, the newest member of the UIU team, get, the uglier the case looks and the hungrier other law enforcement agencies are for a piece of it. At length, Sloan’s hot-trigger reaction to a particularly condescending Broward County detective gets her booted off the task force, then placed on administrative leave, even as she discovers more and more victims.
A relentless nail-biter whether below or above the waterline. Even the setbacks are suspenseful.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5420-0964-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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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