An entertaining tale that’s sure to leave readers anticipating the protagonist’s next misadventure.
In this comedic, supernatural series starter, a San Diego private eye finds himself caught in the middle of a brewing war between mythical beings.
One day in 2013,private detective John Smith is attacked by humanoid crabs that he initially, and mistakenly, thinks are men in costume. Before the crab-men can kill him, a stranger named Anastasia Dumenyova comes to his rescue. She takes him to House Borghesi, a home for vampires who call themselves “the People.” Humans have long been unaware of the existence of such paranormal beings in their midst, which also include goblins and shape-shifters, among others. To avoid open warfare between certain species, these beings work with mediators. Evidently, John is the last mediator available in the area—except that he isn’t one, really; he just added “mediation” to his advertisement for the rhyme (reflected in the book’s title). Currently, Lord Beel-Kasan, the demigod of nightmares and terror, is accusing the House of stealing something. John is willing to mediate, as it’s preferable to being killed by one of the People. It’s soon apparent, however, that the theft may have been committed specifically to incite a war. Anastasia surmises that there’s a traitor in the House and secretly enlists John to dig into the matter, although Juliette, the vampire she suspects, points the finger right back at her. Tullbane, the author of The Storm in Her Smile (2020), presents a consistently amusing story. It effectively introduces a creature-laden world, but it concentrates mainly on the vampiric People. The action is minimal, however; John spends an inordinate amount of time in the House as the target of vampires’ body-shaming, for example. But both the action and the investigation pick up in the final act, and the appeal of certain characters, namely spiky-haired Juliette, surges. There are abundant pop-culture references, but the plot never relies upon them. Some enigmas are left at the end for sequels to explore, such as John’s inexplicable immunity to the People’s supernatural “compulsion.”
An entertaining tale that’s sure to leave readers anticipating the protagonist’s next misadventure.Pub Date: May 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73348-245-5
Page Count: 329
Publisher: Ghost Falls Press
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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