A compelling, action-packed thriller simmering with intrigue, suspense, and twisty mystery.
In Coburn’s mystery novel, a young woman dedicates her life to solving her mother’s murder.
In 1986, when good-natured graduating high school senior Charlotte “Charlie” Purdue comes home from school one day, her world is forever changed. First, her father, a local log cabin contractor, speeds out of town after telling his daughter that “leaving now is the only way I know to keep you safe.” Then, she discovers her mother’s murdered corpse, and things begin to spin out of control. The police of Concrete, Washington, have no leads, and when local boys find evidence that her father drowned in a local river, Charlotte accepts her fate as a grieving daughter but vows to find out what happened—despite small-town Concrete’s local gossipmongers, who’ve drawn their own conclusions. When Charlie thinks she sees her father in a low-budget movie, she immediately heads off to Hollywood to investigate. Things get murkier once she arrives and insinuates herself into the windswept desert set of a low-budget “zombie epic,” edging ever closer to finding her father while encountering a “cauldron of intrigues” blocking her path, including fake priests, seasoned actors, and a math whiz who writes in Russian Cyrillic text. The author is exacting in his depiction of Charlie, a gun-toting girl who exhibits the tenacity and diligence of a seasoned police investigator; as the story grows darker and more suspenseful, Charlie emerges as rock-solid in her determination. Gritty and immersively entertaining, Coburn’s novel draws readers into the movie-set melodrama as the book’s narrative momentum consistently picks up speed. The author has some difficulty with scene transitions, which can be jarring, but he makes up for these rocky shifts with convincing, authentic emotional nuances and dangerous situations that establish Charlie as a fierce protagonist.
A compelling, action-packed thriller simmering with intrigue, suspense, and twisty mystery.Pub Date: March 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781509253388
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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