Fans of crime dramas will find Clary’s suspenseful yarn a welcome addition to the genre and hope for more to come.
A rousing legal thriller about abduction, murder, and a dedicated lawyer struggling to come to terms with her complex personal and professional lives.
Houston trial attorney Clary’s debut novel opens with the kidnapping of a naïve, rural Texas teenage girl, the seventh victim of a serial killer. Diligent, successful veteran attorney Michelle “Mickey” Grant is tense about the news. Her career is on the fast track, but her personal life has seen better days. As a consequence of her aggressive career ambitions, Mickey’s marriage disintegrated more than a year ago, and her ex-husband, Tyler Grant, was granted primary custody of their now-teenage daughter, Reagan. Her daughter fits the kidnapping victims’ type, so Mickey has become increasingly vigilant about Reagan’s whereabouts as the Christmas holiday draws close. Mickey excitedly anticipates spending a week with her, but then Reagan goes missing. Convicted felon and drug abuser Willie Lee Flynn is charged with the kidnappings right before the bloodied body of one of his alleged victims is found. Increasingly desperate for answers, Mickey attends the court trial; the cunning, tight-lipped Flynn is convicted on circumstantial evidence. Mickey remains unsatisfied, though, and visits Flynn in prison to question him further. Meanwhile, her relationship with Tyler gets messier due to an ill-conceived indiscretion. Mickey files a highly controversial amicus curiae brief in an attempt to retry Flynn and find out Reagan’s whereabouts—a move that puts Mickey’s life in jeopardy. Clary maintains a mood of dread and suspense throughout the novel and particularly excels during the vivid, tense trial scenes and his descriptions of his characters’ attributes, including Mickey’s attractiveness and the shifty police chief’s sartorial uniqueness—he wears a black suit, bolo tie, “and a vest that bulged under the strain from his sizable belly.” Overall, the author creates an imaginative, convincing cast of strong, memorable personalities who carry the mystery along at an impressive clip, although some details at the book’s conclusion seem a bit perfunctory.
Fans of crime dramas will find Clary’s suspenseful yarn a welcome addition to the genre and hope for more to come.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-8320-7
Page Count: 330
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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