A perfect setting but an imperfect mystery.
In this sequel, a struggling actress’s career break takes a deadly turn when she learns the accidental deaths of two stars who preceded her in a role may have been murders.
Jenna Howland is not a detective, but she is the daughter of one, and she has just been cast to play one on TV. Her joy is short-lived when the sister of one of the show’s two dead actresses visits Jenna to share her certainty that her sibling was murdered and that the series’ handsome, charismatic leading man, Jake Cottington, is a likely suspect. (He was also dating the other dead actress who played the role Jenna just landed.) Jenna wonders whether this part is like the Hope Diamond: cursed. She decides to play a real-life investigator: “When Jenna was a young girl, she’d overheard” her father “discuss cases and sort out facts and motives so she learned from an early age how to investigate—a skill that she would need for her part but more importantly, to save her life.” That is a promising high concept for a mystery series. But Jenna shares top billing in this story with Detective Philip Westmore, introduced in Richman’s unpublished debut novel, A Dangerous Transformation. Westmore is initially ill-prepared to answer Jenna’s inquiries about the two deaths; it is his first day as a senior detective with the Malibu Police Department. He discovers that his predecessors were sloppy in their investigations and soon has a cast of suspects, including Jake; Freeda Brown, a has-been who coveted the role Jenna got; and hotshot producer Hugh Blackman and his wife, Charla, who loves her lavish lifestyle more than her cheating, abusive husband. Jenna and Philip are appealing characters and make a good team. But the tale suffers in the execution. After having established Jenna’s new job as a star on a TV series, the author at one point refers to it as a movie. On three occasions, Philip’s name is spelled with two l’s. There is the odd incomplete sentence (“Though, she wasn’t going to correct her until she got some information”). And the story’s Hollywood portions are less convincing than the procedural and trial scenes. Would Jenna, an unknown, be hired without being screen-tested with Jake—never mind the question of whether a network would continue a series after two of its stars died.
A perfect setting but an imperfect mystery.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 393
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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