A profound meditation on humanity and faith in a story of a small town with big dreams.
Dowdall offers a literary mystery set against the backdrop of a Canadian river town in 1962, where ambition and tragedy collide in the construction of a monumental suspension bridge.
The story opens with the arrival of Sister Harriet, a nun in her late 20s, in Bothonville, Ontario (pronounced “Buttonville”), to teach science at Saint Reginald’s, a prestigious all-girls Catholic high school. The young nun is already struggling to reconcile her religious calling with the increasingly secular influences of her surroundings. She also learns that she’ll have two additional duties at the school: to supervise and judge a miniature bridge-building competition for the girls (along with handsome fellow teacher, Mr. Monserrat) and to sit on a design committee for a full-sized bridge, set to span from Bothonville to the United States. However, over the course of the school year, three different senior girls vanish from the school, and the investigation into the tragic circumstances of their disappearances—by law enforcement and by Harriet herself—are a major storyline. However, Dowdall retains a focus on the girls’ lives and the ripple effects of their disappearances, always refraining from straying into lurid crime-fiction territory. In addition, because Harriet spent several formative years in Bothonville, her perspective offers an illuminating look at changes in the town amid increasing industrialization; her participation on the bridge committee results in her being caught up in this tumult. There’s also intrigue involving plans for a bridge in a neighboring town. Harriet’s inner turmoil and the town’s ambitions create a compelling tension, as her doubts about her faith and the church’s role in the modern world mirror Bothonville’s difficulties reconciling tradition and progress. Despite the mounting tragedies, the novel concludes on a bittersweet but satisfying note. Not all the plot threads are neatly tied up, leaving room for the messiness of reality—a fitting choice for a story so concerned with humankind’s imperfections.
A profound meditation on humanity and faith in a story of a small town with big dreams.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781998926121
Page Count: 343
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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