A fun throwback horror tale that will keep readers on edge.
In this horror mystery, an unlikely group of detectives investigates the evil forces at work in a small town.
Donovan Graves is a parapsychology professor in Chicago with a well-earned skepticism of the paranormal, caught between a desire to debunk those he sees as fraudsters and a sincere yearning to know what waits on the other side of death. His work is fueled in part by his own grief over the loss of his son, David, who died in childhood. Now—in a moment when paranormal activity is on the rise across the world—Donovan feels for the first time that David is trying to contact him. A message appears in front of his son’s grave: “FIND HER.” Meanwhile, in Williston, North Dakota, high school senior Rachel Black is having her own problems with a ghost: recurrent dreams filled with screaming wake her in the middle of the night. Rachel knows who the screams belong to. Nearly a year ago on Halloween, a woman named Annabel Heller was murdered by her husband. Rachel isn’t the only one experiencing the supernatural. Jason Hardy has just arrived in Williston to perform an audit of the local hospital. Stationed in the old building while nearly all other personnel have moved to the new one, Jason begins to hear and see strange things. Chicago medium Madam Helen Bovell isn’t exactly on the up and up. She lost her psychic gift years ago, and ever since she’s been forced to scam her customers. But for some reason, her ability has recently come back—and tells her inexplicably to locate Rachel Black. As these four figures assemble in the remote town of Williston—“a place of drifting roughnecks and dirty riches beneath windy, barren plains”—a mystery involving restless forces demands to be solved. But just how dark can the mystery get? The seekers have less than a week to find out since Halloween is just around the corner.
Devore’s prose deftly vacillates between the concrete and the phantasmagoric: “Rachel drifted in and out of sleep. Her muscles were relaxed, and her body felt as if floating into a dream. Someone called her name, but the voice came from the dreamscape. The real world had fallen away, ceding its authority to the infinite realm of the mind.” The book unfolds slowly, the tension rising with every chapter, drawing its characters closer together while spiking the stakes. The small-town North Dakota setting, which is painted in even bleaker terms than readers might already imagine, is a perfect spot for this sort of ticking-clock ghost story. The novel evokes the spirit of 1980s horror paperbacks, both in its prodigious length (over 550 pages) and its unapologetic drift into classic—and sometimes campy—territories of the genre. The less said about the twists the better, but the author will keep readers engrossed all the way through. The ending, while perhaps a bit neat, satisfies well enough. An experienced writer of thrillers, Devore has made a successful sally into spookier realms.
A fun throwback horror tale that will keep readers on edge.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9852413-8-4
Page Count: 562
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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