Fourteen tales of dark doings in sunny Palm Springs.
As editor DeMarco-Barrett points out, it’s hard to think “noir” in a landscape that offers 300 days of sunshine a year. But unrelenting heat and light can do funny things to your brain. What else could explain why a longtime karaoke DJ heads south with a trunk full of his partner’s body parts in Tod Goldberg’s “A Career Spent Disappointing People”? Or how a runaway from the Betty Ford Clinic becomes a cat burglar in Eduardo Santiago’s “The Ankle of Anza”? Or how two vacationing college grads get hopelessly lost on a road three miles from the Joshua Tree parking lot in Ken Layne’s “The Loop Trail”? Of course the desert has always been a magnet for the extremes in human behavior. Where else would a group of religious renegades set up camp, as they do in Alex Espinoza’s “The Salt Calls Us Back”? Where else would the CIA conduct the bizarre mind-control experiments Rob Roberge chronicles in “The Expendables”? But even in the extreme Palm Springs climate, the tried-and-true noir motives still stand. There’s money, as in Janet Fitch’s “Sunrise.” There’s the love that goes wrong in Chris J. Bahnsen’s “Octagon Girl” and Kelly Shire’s “A Cold Girl.” There’s the fear that sprouts in J.D. Horn’s “The Stand-In.” And sometimes all three can produce a toxic mix, as they do in DeMarco-Barrett’s “The Water Holds You Still."
An engaging mix of the good, the bad, and the off-kilter.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61775-928-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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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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Twenty years after Chloe Davis’ father was convicted of killing half a dozen young women, someone seems to be celebrating the anniversary by extending the list.
No one in little Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, was left untouched by Richard Davis’ confession, least of all his family members. His wife, Mona, tried to kill herself and has been incapacitated ever since. His son, Cooper, became so suspicious that even now it’s hard for him to accept pharmaceutical salesman Daniel Briggs, whose sister, Sophie, also vanished 20 years ago, as Chloe’s fiance. And Chloe’s own nightmares, which lead her to rebuff New York Times reporter Aaron Jansen, who wants to interview her for an anniversary story, are redoubled when her newest psychiatric patient, Lacey Deckler, follows the path of high school student Aubrey Gravino by disappearing and then turning up dead. The good news is that Dick Davis, whom Chloe has had no contact with ever since he was imprisoned after his confession, obviously didn’t commit these new crimes. The bad news is that someone else did, someone who knows a great deal about the earlier cases, someone who could be very close to Chloe indeed. First-timer Willingham laces her first-person narrative with a stifling sense of victimhood that extends even to the survivors and a series of climactic revelations, at least some of which are guaranteed to surprise the most hard-bitten readers.
The story is sadly familiar, the treatment claustrophobically intense.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-2508-0382-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
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