An exciting, elegant novel that uses painful realities to create a powerful tale about the nature of relationships.
In Voelker’s debut novel, a man goes on a mission to Wyoming while grieving his stillborn daughter.
Ryan Quinn lives in a suburb of Chicago with his expectant wife, Kathy. They reside in horse-farm country, with marshes and geese scattered around an ideal landscape that lends itself more to mist than strip malls. Their domestic tranquility is shattered, however, when Kathy senses a problem with her pregnancy, and she soon loses the baby. Devastated by the loss, the two decide to separate, and Ryan moves to downtown Chicago. When he hears that his grandfather Henry in Wyoming is in the hospital, he heads west, bringing along a quilt originally intended for his daughter, which he plans to bury in the mountains. When he gets to Jackson Hole, he finds it abuzz with news of a missing girl. As local tensions rise, he encounters hostility and suspicion, complicating his already difficult trip. Ryan’s grandfather, who lives near Jackson Hole, is a salt-of-the-earth World War II vet whose vivacious demeanor and soulful advice help to make this story more contemplative than melancholy; he offers both insight and comic relief. Ryan is a surprisingly capable character, seemingly handy with everything, yet as he heads up into the Tetons, he encounters forces he may not be able to control. The April landscape, “where rags of snow lay in the shadows,” simultaneously offers ample placidity and plenty of danger. Voelker’s writing is concise and full of dead-on descriptions and well-timed details of scrappy fights, small-town innuendo, and the grotesque. Ryan moves easily between wildly disparate environments, and the author’s use of short, italicized flashbacks will keep readers interested about the past, even as tension in the present day ramps up. This novel is exciting enough to please those looking for a simple adventure, but the quality of the carefully crafted, often gorgeous prose makes it a far more important story, and Voelker is talented enough to keep readers wanting more. Overall, it’s an impressive debut, with a conclusion that’s as reflective as it is cathartic.
An exciting, elegant novel that uses painful realities to create a powerful tale about the nature of relationships.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 158
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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