A fine debut by a talented writer, featuring a well-crafted new PI.
In this mystery, a struggling private investigator agrees to help an elderly woman find her estranged nephew and runs into identity theft, dysfunctional rental cars, and murder.
Canadian private investigator Jorja Knight is down on her luck. Work’s thin on the ground and the rent’s due, so when the chance to track down a wealthy client’s relative comes up, she grabs it. Zosia Gorwitz last saw her nephew Stanislav Gorwitz in Poland in 1939, just before she and her mother fled the Axis alliance. Zosia’s grandfather and father were sent to Auschwitz, and her brother died in battle. After visiting the Canadian Holocaust Memorial and seeing the name Stanislav Gorwitz in the registry, though, Zosia became convinced that her nephew immigrated to Vancouver. It’s a long shot, but she wants Jorja to find him and reunite them. Stan, it turns out, died in a shooting, but he had a son, Johnnie, who may still be alive. Jorja traces a man who seems to have the right name and credentials, but it soon becomes clear that he’s not the person she’s looking for. Where is Johnnie, and why is someone else using his identity—and is it related to the reason that Calgary’s vagrants seem to keep disappearing? Along the way, an incident involving an overturned watermelon truck leaves Jorja needing a cheap rental car. This first in a planned mystery series offers a very promising introduction to a likable PI of the traditional world-weary, hand-to-mouth type. Although readers won’t find anything particularly radical here, the novel succeeds through its warmth, its generic familiarity, and its humor. For example, Jorja visits JumpIn Jalopies to get a rental car, where she receives a succession of wrecks whose “special” features include front doors that won’t open, alarms that go off at random times, and a particularly unpleasant smell that threatens to land her in trouble with the police. The mystery itself is tight and well plotted with enough twists and curveballs to keep most crime fans on their toes.
A fine debut by a talented writer, featuring a well-crafted new PI.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 353
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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