A breathtaking combination of police procedural and twisted psychological thriller.
The Scottish Highlands provide the scene for another complex and chilling case for a Glasgow detective with troubles of her own.
After closing another case in the Highlands, DCI Christine Caplan is saying goodbye to her local team before beginning her trip home to Glasgow. Her children are in recovery from a near-death experience on an island retreat, and her husband, Aklen, is too traumatized to leave the house. Before Caplan can depart, though, she’s called back to Cronchie, where a man has jumped or been pushed off the Connel Bridge over the Falls of Lora. It turns out that Ted Maxwell, the victim, was stabbed, and he was a psychologist who had been working on a book about children who kill. His death creates panic in officialdom because the notorious Girl A, who was accused of killing at least three people as a child, has just been released from a psychiatric institute—and the name she chose for her new secret identity is Lora Connel, echoing the site of Maxwell's death. She herself was nearly killed in a recent fire no doubt set by one of the millions of people who hate her, two of them her own sisters, and is now on the run. The laws protecting underage criminals with mental problems make it hard for Caplan to get information about her, but because she's actually Gillian Halliday, who lived with her family nearby and is well known to Caplan’s team, she soon learns her history. Meeting the family and Gillian herself moves Caplan to look into the older crimes. Much to her surprise, she feels that something is off about them even as the higher-ups push for a quick resolution to the Maxwell case and set a deadline to wrap it up.
A breathtaking combination of police procedural and twisted psychological thriller.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781448306763
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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
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