A hook so irresistible that it hardly matters that the line and sinker don’t live up to it.
A bestselling crime novel’s dedication—“I know what you did, Petal Woznewski. Now everyone else will too”—comes to the attention of a reader named Petal Woznewski.
Not that anybody calls her Petal anymore. Gus Johnson, her friend with intermittent benefits, and everyone else goes along with her wish to be called Petta. But back when she was a teenager who’d just transferred to West High School after her parents’ suicides left her to be raised by her aunt Shelly, a retired physics professor at the University of Wisconsin, she was known as Petal to the few people who knew her at all. Their number included Megan Hollister, a 14-year-old from a well-to-do family, and Jenny Isaacs, her much less well-off best friend. Megan and Jenny took the newcomer under their wings, sharing their gossip and sneaking off late at night to hang out with beer, weed, and each other. All of that ended abruptly when Megan died in a freak accident that Jenny and Petal covered up their involvement in. Thirty years later, the pseudonymous ME Littleton has claimed in No One Suspected that Jenny, renamed Izzy Jacobs, watched in horror as Megan, renamed Miriam Rowley, was stabbed to death by Petal. Who is ME Littleton? Why are they hurling this false but painful accusation at Petal after all this time? And why is she the only character whose distinctive name hasn’t been changed, making her ridiculously easy to trace? Returning to her stomping grounds, she starts asking questions that quickly make things much more dangerous, even if the answers aren’t nearly as gripping.
A hook so irresistible that it hardly matters that the line and sinker don’t live up to it.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781639103294
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
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