Characters you immediately care for fight Covid and killers in exciting adventures touching on politically sensitive topics.
A fight over wild horses may provide the motive for murder.
The wild horse roundup that Lincoln County, Nevada, Sheriff Porter Beck and his deputy, Tuffy Scruggs, watch is a contentious event pitting horse advocates against ranchers who want every blade of grass on public land to go to their cattle. The use of helicopters to chase the frantic horses into corrals leaves some of the animals injured or dead. The roundup is run by Jolene Manning’s Bureau of Land Management crew, whose rough methods are decried by CANTER, a horse rescue group run by Etta Clay. When the helicopter crashes, Beck and Tuffy discover that the pilot was shot out of the sky. Jolene blames Etta, but Beck is open to other theories. Beck’s dealing with his Pop, the former sheriff, whose dementia is worsening; Covid-19, which is just starting to ravage the area; and his upcoming move to work alongside his girlfriend, state Det. Charlie Blue Horse. Despite his private opinion, Beck doesn’t take sides on the horse roundups, but he has a feeling that the CANTER crowd didn’t kill the pilot, who was having an affair with Jolene. On top of that, Beck’s adopted sister, Brinley Cummings, rescued from a horrendous childhood by Pop, was volunteering with a group dealing with troubled youth and hasn’t returned from following a runaway. When Jolene is buried up to her neck and trampled by wild horses, tensions flare. The FBI suspect Robert Lewis Northrup Jr., who suffers from PTSD. Enter the bosses of a politically sensitive lithium mine whose land impact reports may be false. Beck and his crew have a wild ride tracking down the murderer.
Characters you immediately care for fight Covid and killers in exciting adventures touching on politically sensitive topics.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781250373908
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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