A character-driven tale that maintains its sincerity even in its most nerve-wracking moments.
In Beakey’s (Double Abduction, 2007) thriller, an investigation into a tragic accident during a blizzard reveals a string of secrets—including a murder.
When Stephen Porter’s 17-year-old daughter, Sara, calls to tell him that she’s stranded, he willingly braves a relentless blizzard to rescue her. He tracks down the address that she gives him, and he’s worried that she’s not at a girlfriend’s house, as she’d earlier claimed, but at the home of a man in his late 20s. That man is Kieran O’Shea, who’s 10 years Sara’s senior and a teacher at her school. Sara is tutoring his younger, autistic brother, Aidan, but tonight she and Kieran were spending some time alone. Sara, however, learns more about Kieran than she wanted to know, particularly after she happens upon a box of medication. She decides to go home soon after he hops in his truck to find Aidan, who ran out of the house; she calls Stephen when her own car fails to start. A subsequent mishap results in a death, and the person responsible is suddenly at the mercy of a witness. Investigating detective John Caruso believes that the incident may also tie in with the recent murder of a local teacher—and the resulting coverups only lead to more violence. The tension starts high in this novel, with a description of the sounds of a winter storm (“The blizzard winds hit the bedroom windows with brute-force, the wump sounds registering in the recesses of Stephen Porter’s mind”). Beakey parallels his thriller plot with an engaging family drama; for example, it’s revealed that Stephen’s wife, Lori, died when her car struck a guardrail—a collision that the insurance company is now claiming was suicide. Kieran, meanwhile, is haunted by his late, abusive mother, while Stephen’s son, Kenneth, is the target of a bully. Beakey maintains the suspense by continually hinting at what characters may or may not have done, and Sara and Stephen are both in dire straits by the final act. It’s all packaged within a taut narrative that constantly reminds readers of the bitter-cold weather that constrains the characters, as when Stephen, without a car, breaks “into an unsteady near-run, heedless of the hard-packed ice underneath his feet.”
A character-driven tale that maintains its sincerity even in its most nerve-wracking moments.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68261-154-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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