This departure from Hill’s Kit Doyle series (I Wish You Missed Me, 2017, etc.) is less a mystery than a psychological...
A tortuous tale of murder and madness.
Divorced environmental scientist Claire Barrett works for the river conservancy along with her friend, volunteer Tessa McCall. Claire’s trying to live with her guilt over a one-time sexual encounter with her longtime friend Al Paden that might have passed unnoticed if someone hadn’t called her husband to snitch on her, leading to their divorce. Claire’s daughter no longer speaks to her, but she’s kept up her friendship with Tessa and her lawyer husband, Eric. Now Tessa seems to be having a lot of worrisome memory lapses that are aggravated when first a badly crushed car and then a woman's body are discovered in the San Joaquin River near their workplace. Their boss, Rosemary Boudreaux, has always been hard on Tessa, who she thinks of as a "rich-bitch volunteer," and now the pressure she’s putting on her only worsens her condition. Rosemary has no love for Claire, either, because she’s a close friend of Al Paden’s ex-wife. While the police work to identify the dead body, Tessa tells Claire she saw a woman in an ice-blue dress near the river but can’t be sure it’s not a figment of her imagination. A gun found in the ruined car turns out to be a Luger like one Al owns. When Claire asks him to look for his, it’s vanished, possibly stolen in a robbery but certainly making Al look guilty to the police. Doing what she can to support Tessa, who seems to be getting worse, Claire can only hope the truth will help her friend.
This departure from Hill’s Kit Doyle series (I Wish You Missed Me, 2017, etc.) is less a mystery than a psychological thriller offering insight into love, friendship, and mental illness.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8745-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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BOOK TO SCREEN
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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