A flawed but entertaining occult murder mystery.
In Barry’s third Salem novel, the unsolved murders of three young women continue to roil “Witch City.”
It’s 2014, and Rose Whelan, once a prominent historian specializing in the study of the Salem witch trials, is now an addled bag lady who wanders the streets of Salem, accosting passers-by with dire predictions and obsessing about oak trees, Celtic goddesses, and an avenging spirit called a banshee. When a bad-seed teenager who threatens Rose is killed, seemingly by an unearthly shriek, the townsfolk pressure Salem Police Chief John Rafferty, a recovering alcoholic, to reopen a 25-year-old cold case, the 1989 slayings of three wannabe witches in which Rose was implicated but never charged. Rose had asked several women, descendants of accused witches hanged in 1692, to consecrate, on Halloween, the ground where the bodies of their ancestors had been dumped in a crevasse. The ceremony turned chaotic as three of the women, Olivia, Cheryl, and Susan, were murdered, by an unseen hand, to the accompaniment of a bansheelike shriek. A fourth, Leah, went missing. The only survivors were Rose and Callie, Olivia’s 5-year-old daughter, whom Rose rescued. Raised by nuns elsewhere in Massachusetts, Callie was told that Rose had died. Upon learning that she's alive, she returns to Salem to help her. Told variably from the points of view of Callie, Rafferty, and Rose, the story grows convoluted as the fortunes of two old New England rival families, the Hathornes and the Whitings, intermesh with Rose’s ravings, Callie’s clairvoyance, and Rafferty’s continuing struggle to find the truth while remaining sober. (Tip: when falling off the wagon, avoid absinthe.) Since the ultimate answers are supplied or at least confirmed by Callie’s visions and dreams, one wonders why she couldn’t have divulged these earlier, saving us all from having to turn (eagerly, it must be said) so many pages. The investigation concentrates on what proves to be a major MacGuffin, pulling focus away from the actual culprit, who is hiding in plain sight.
A flawed but entertaining occult murder mystery.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-90560-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
A storytelling machine, Jance in her 41st (Trial by Fire, 2009, etc.) is at the top of her game and just about irresistible.
Jance offers that rare—and welcome—hybrid: the suspense novel with heart.
Jonathan Southard is one of those unhappy men whose unrequited love affair with life has caused a volatile, long-term, internal simmering. One day the mixture explodes, resulting in a crime that is both horrific and, in a sense at least, foreseeable. He shoots his wife, her dog and their two young children, construing this last as an act of mercy inasmuch as it will spare them an aftermath of humiliation and shame. Having wiped out his San Diego family, he sets off for Tucson and the home of his mother, planning to clean the slate. He’s always hated Abby Tennant, attributing to her voluminous maternal shortcomings, of which she is largely innocent. With less difficulty than Southard expected, the bodies are discovered, clues are put together, identities established and soon enough the manhunt is on, participated in by multiple police forces from several states. Among these are the elite Shadow Wolves, Indians who patrol reservation land near the Mexican border. Enter Dan Pardeey. Half Anglo, half Apache, he has a special connection to the small survivor of another of Southard’s monstrous crimes. Angelina Enos, age four, has remained alive only by virtue of being tiny enough to escape notice. Eerily, this parallels Pardee’s own long-ago experience, and when she reaches out to him he has no choice but to respond. Because he does, his life is irrevocably changed and, in a kind of chain reaction, so are the lives of a variety of other players, one way or another, for good or ill, in Jance’s absorbing cast.
A storytelling machine, Jance in her 41st (Trial by Fire, 2009, etc.) is at the top of her game and just about irresistible.Pub Date: July 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-123924-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
Clear directions, but don’t try the rope trick at home.
A gay cop is found hanged. Was it suicide, murder, or kinky sex gone wrong? Street-smart Minneapolis police detectives Sam Kovac and Nikki Liska, back on the beat after Ashes to Ashes (1999), learn a lot about autoerotic asphyxiation while trying to crack the case.
Sam and Nikki remain tough but likable protagonists as they investigate a long list of possible suspects: the victim’s alcoholic father, a partially paralyzed cop; a jealous older brother with a taste for violence; a mysterious blond socialite of amazing strength; a hero cop turned crime-show host; and so on. But the detectives also view a home video unwittingly left to posterity by a hapless devotee of self-stimulation through suffocation that suggests the possibility of accidental death. (The author points out, somewhat in the style of a public-service announcement, that many teenage suicides by hanging may well be experimentation of this kind gone tragically wrong.) Unlike the sadistic sexual practices on display in Ashes to Ashes, this particular perversion is more pathetic than titillating, although Hoag tries hard to crank up the suspense. Energetic, down-to-earth prose and realistically gritty dialogue help push the workmanlike plot to its complex conclusion, but a notepad and pencil may come in handy to remember who shot whom, when, and why. Unfortunately, the author has chosen to write about a milieu with which she is clearly unfamiliar: urban gay life (here, exclusively male). Not wanting to offend or get too far into the seamier side of gay culture, Hoag settles for bland political correctness and a balanced ratio of 50 percent good gay guys to 50 percent bad gay guys. In dramatic terms, they cancel each other out, and none of them is particularly believable. For all the double-crosses, dire threats, and crashing around with guns, the story just isn’t thrilling or chilling. But it does move—and fast.
Clear directions, but don’t try the rope trick at home.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2000
ISBN: 0-553-10634-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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