A measured crime story that deftly forefronts its indelible characters.
In this procedural, Baltimore detectives help distill an alcoholic’s hazy recollection in order to unmask a serial murderer.
Sgt. William Mankiller and his rookie partner, Det. Maria Esperanza Ruiz, work a frustrating case involving missing women. The detectives have nothing to go on; the victims, who are all blond and have similar body types, vanished without a trace. A body washes up in the harbor—a woman who looks like the ones missing—and Mankiller and Ruiz think that a murderer, who’s thus far covered their tracks, has finally made a blunder. The good news? There’s a potential witness. The bad news, however, is that it’s Kyle Owen “KO” Bannon, a former prizefighter-turned-drunk who claims he saw a dragon kill a woman. The detectives are convinced the mythical creature from KO’s memory will ultimately reveal a critical detail about the perpetrator. While KO fights to stay sober, a psychologist makes a wild suggestion—“recreate” what KO witnessed by sending him right back to the bottle. There’s surprisingly little tension in Harper and Galehouse’s novel. Although readers get a glimpse of a frighteningly careful murderer, this villain spends most of their time avoiding detection. The story focuses on the lively cast, from the seasoned veteran cop and the rookie bonding over hot cocoa to the struggling alcoholic hoping to repair the severed relationship with his daughter. Likewise, a snowy Baltimore winter generates a memorable setting and sparks colorful passages: “The cold sank its claws into everything and kept its grip, even as the days inched toward February.” Despite the detectives’ ongoing investigation, the alleged dragon is the grandest mystery, and the most compelling dilemma is the ethical question of persuading KO to drink again. Still, it all builds to a riveting final act and a worthy payoff.
A measured crime story that deftly forefronts its indelible characters.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Papillon du Père Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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