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
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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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