Series fans may miss the soulful, empathetic Erlendur, but Sigurdur, who could be a younger version of his boss, is at the...
No good deed goes unpunished, and sometimes they entangle you in murder.
Reykjavík detective Sigurdur Óli agrees reluctantly to help Hermann, a colleague of his old friend Patrekur and a victim of blackmail. Hermann and his wife, an aspiring politician, have until recently been swingers. Lína and Ebbi, another participating couple in their group, have filmed them and now demand money. Sigurdur agrees to talk to them sternly but regrets his decision almost immediately. Having recently split from his wife, Bergthóra, he's often out of sorts and preoccupied. His boss and mentor, Erlendur (Outrage, 2012, etc.), is still away on an unspecified leave of absence, and Sigurdur finds himself tangling regularly with his abrasive colleague Finnur. Visiting the home of the blackmailers, Sigurdur interrupts a masked intruder beating Lína. He chases the man for blocks but can't catch him. Lína is taken to the hospital, where she lingers for days before passing away. With virtually no leads, Sigurdur returns to Hermann and Patrekur in a fruitless attempt to gain traction as Finnur relentlessly needles him. Also in the mix is Andrés, a disturbed young man whose past involves scarring abuse at the hands of his stepfather and whose stream-of-consciousness chapters alternate with the main narrative. Ironically, Sigurdur also finds a need to revisit his parents for answers. Dogged police work leads inevitably to a surprising ripped-from-the-headlines solution.
Series fans may miss the soulful, empathetic Erlendur, but Sigurdur, who could be a younger version of his boss, is at the center of a sophisticated and complex thriller.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-00039-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
It’s hard to think of any writer since Flannery O’Connor, referenced at several key moments here, who’s succeeded as...
Slaughter’s latest break from the punishing travails of Dr. Sara Linton and Will Trent (The Kept Woman, 2016, etc.) uses a school shooting to reunite two sisters who’ve had compelling reasons for avoiding each other in the years since their own childhood horrors.
Twenty-eight years ago, two masked men broke into attorney Rusty Quinn’s Georgia home looking for the man of the house, the kind of lawyer who gives lawyers a bad name. In Rusty’s absence, things went south instantly, leaving Gamma Quinn dead, her daughter Samantha shot in the head and buried alive, and her daughter Charlotte fleeing in terror. Sam somehow survived and rose above her brain damage to become a successful New York patent attorney; Charlie remained in Pikeville, joined the criminal defense bar, and married ADA Ben Bernard. But she and Ben have separated; she’s taken solace in some quick sex with a stranger in a parking lot; and when she goes to the middle school where her one-night stand works as a history teacher to pick up the cellphone she left behind, she walks into the middle of a shooting that brings back all her own trauma. Goth girl Kelly Wilson admits she shot and killed Douglas Pinkman, the school principal, and 8-year-old Lucy Alexander, but Rusty, whose inbox is already overflowing with hate mail provoked by all the lowlifes he’s defended, is determined to serve as her attorney, with Sam as a most unlikely second chair. In addition to the multilayered conflicts among the Quinns and everyone else in town, Sam, who urged her sister to flee their childhood nightmare, and Charlie, who’s had to live with fleeing ever since, will have to deal with memories that make it hard for them to sit in the same room.
It’s hard to think of any writer since Flannery O’Connor, referenced at several key moments here, who’s succeeded as consistently as Slaughter at using horrific violence to evoke pity and terror. Whether she’s extending her franchise or creating stand-alones like this, she really does make your hair stand on end.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-243024-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are...
A perfect wife’s disappearance plunges her husband into a nightmare as it rips open ugly secrets about his marriage and, just maybe, his culpability in her death.
Even after they lost their jobs as magazine writers and he uprooted her from New York and spirited her off to his childhood home in North Carthage, Mo., where his ailing parents suddenly needed him at their side, Nick Dunne still acted as if everything were fine between him and his wife, Amy. His sister Margo, who’d gone partners with him on a local bar, never suspected that the marriage was fraying, and certainly never knew that Nick, who’d buried his mother and largely ducked his responsibilities to his father, stricken with Alzheimer’s, had taken one of his graduate students as a mistress. That’s because Nick and Amy were both so good at playing Mr. and Ms. Right for their audience. But that all changes the morning of their fifth anniversary when Amy vanishes with every indication of foul play. Partly because the evidence against him looks so bleak, partly because he’s so bad at communicating grief, partly because he doesn’t feel all that grief-stricken to begin with, the tide begins to turn against Nick. Neighbors who’d been eager to join the police in the search for Amy begin to gossip about him. Female talk-show hosts inveigh against him. The questions from Detective Rhonda Boney and Detective Jim Gilpin get sharper and sharper. Even Nick has to acknowledge that he hasn’t come close to being the husband he liked to think he was. But does that mean he deserves to get tagged as his wife’s killer? Interspersing the mystery of Amy’s disappearance with flashbacks from her diary, Flynn (Dark Places, 2009, etc.) shows the marriage lumbering toward collapse—and prepares the first of several foreseeable but highly effective twists.
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are chilling.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-58836-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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