A skillfully written mystery about family drama and a quest for redemption.
After being shunned for years, a daughter returns home to unravel her family’s darkest secret in Stanley’s novel.
Twenty-eight-year-old Madison Moore has mixed feelings when she receives the news that her dying father is desperate to see her. Many years ago, in 2006, her conservative Mormon family shut her out because of what they saw as her rejection of their moral and religious values. Now married and living near Las Vegas, Madison has built a good career for herself as an investigative journalist and fears that a return home to Orem, Utah, will put her back into a conflict she’d left behind. She arrives at her father’s bedside, only to find that he wants to confess his complicity in a decades-old miscarriage of justice that condemned a woman to life in prison for a murder she didn’t commit. Unable to fully explain what happened, he presents Madison with an album of old photographs that he claims will reveal the woman’s innocence: “I have the proof,” he tells her; “I’ve kept it a secret all these years.” Madison can’t find the proof in the album, and her quest for the truth tests her professional skills and stretches her emotions to the breaking point. Meanwhile, the rest of her family resents what they see as her vengeful desire to tarnish their reputation, and they become more suspicious of her motives after learning of the contents of her father’s will. Much of the novel effectively focuses on Madison’s frustration: not only with her intolerant family but also on the wrongly convicted prisoner, who, it turns out, seems uninterested in evidence that might exonerate her. The book also delves into intriguing themes, including the effects of long-buried family secrets, unspoken fears, and unresolved conflicts, and readers will find Stanley’s treatment of these issues almost as compelling as the mystery itself. The story’s eventual resolution is a surprising one that will reward readers for the time they spend with this well-crafted book.
A skillfully written mystery about family drama and a quest for redemption.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2023
ISBN: 979-8989017614
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Twisted Pen
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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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