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
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
