Green’s inability to decide whether her puppets are spooky or just plain nasty leaves the reader high and dry.
Kate Kinsella’s brief career as a detective (Deadly Echo, 2003, etc.) takes a supernatural turn when a childhood friend invites her to chase ghosts in Cornwall.
It seems odd that Helen Woods should fasten on Kate, who barely noticed her at school, but the depth of Helen’s fear at being left alone at Tamberlake while her fiancé Paul Warrinder is off in South America—along with the beastly heat back in Longborough—persuades Kate to take her terrier Jasper and head for the coast, leaving her best friend and landlord, Hubert Humberstone, to hold the fort back home. Kate and Helen are soon joined by Helen’s best friend Gill, who is even more suspicious than Kate about the death of Fran, Paul’s first wife, who supposedly threw her two toddlers off a nearby cliff before plunging to her own rocky death. The mysterious sounds of weeping that kept Helen from sleeping now bedevil Kate. Chatting up the locals, she discovers yet an earlier wife, Alison, who disappeared without a trace shortly before Paul married Fran. She also discovers some of Fran’s watercolors signed by Paul, and a huge bank loan in Paul’s name. Though the wedding preparations move ahead, Helen becomes increasingly nervous, and things continue to go bump in the night.
Green’s inability to decide whether her puppets are spooky or just plain nasty leaves the reader high and dry.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7278-6052-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Familiar thrills lashed to a razor’s edge.
A Spanish cop, incurring a crime lord’s vengeful and wholly unearned wrath, is saddled with a new partner she’s not crazy about herself.
Agreeing to take a late-night call to cover for a colleague who wants to go home to his wife and baby, Officer Cristina Sánchez Pradell, of Marviña’s Policía Local, finds herself face to face with a man she takes to be an armed intruder. Before he can identify himself as Ian Templeton, who broke into his own house after he forgot his keys, he’s startled by a dark figure behind him and fires three shots, killing Angela Fry, the pregnant girlfriend who’d returned with him. Templeton, who’s actually Jack Cleland, a British fugitive widely sought for drug trafficking and killing a cop, blames Cristina’s presence for Angela’s death and swears revenge against her whole family. That includes her husband, Antonio; their 10-year-old son, Lucas; her cancer-stricken sister, Nuri; Nuri’s husband, fellow police officer Paco; and Ana, Cristina’s deaf, blind aunt, whose role will be pivotal. Cleland’s threats ring hollow as long as he’s in custody, but on the journey to transfer him to the custody of John Mackenzie, a disgraced ex-cop on his first day as an investigator for Britain's National Crime Agency, Cleland’s underlings break him out, killing one cop and shooting Paco nonfatally so that he can relay the news to Cristina. Mackenzie, a Scot who has long-standing issues with authority figures of all kinds, is ready to take the next flight home, but Sub-Inspector Miguel López, the chief of Marviña Station, insists that he stay and help Cristina, who clearly needs all the help she can get, however antipathetic its source. As the unwilling partners track down leads to Cleland’s present whereabouts, Cleland, effortlessly outmaneuvering them, zeroes in on one soft target after another. May (I’ll Keep You Safe, 2018, etc.) keeps a few surprises in reserve but not enough to prevent you from thinking you’ve seen this all before.
Familiar thrills lashed to a razor’s edge.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78429-498-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Mobius
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
A solid sense of place, a looming sense of menace: a frequently gripping read.
Veste’s moody procedural tells the story of a pair of Liverpool detectives tracking a killer influenced by local mythology.
Louise Henderson, the investigator at the heart of this novel, is a detective with secrets. She keeps some from her partner, DS Shipley; when the book opens, she’s also grappling with moments of sudden and inexplicable terror that leave her unsure of their origin and unsettled by their impact on her. Soon, the detectives take up the case of a woman who escaped a deadly attack—and who believes it was the work of the title character, a local legend who may be a murderer, a supernatural creature, or something else entirely. Not long after that, a dead body shows up, which suggests a connection to an earlier death, but a host of loose ends hang for the detectives to piece together—and there’s also the matter of a series of flashbacks set years earlier, when a teenager vanished. How these seemingly disparate elements connect—sometimes linearly, sometimes via well-made twists—leads the novel to its conclusion. Veste’s slow-burning approach works well, sustaining the sense of general wrongness that gives the narrative so much atmosphere. There are a few heavy-handed moments here and there. “They thought they knew evil. They had no idea” is perhaps the most flagrant example; as this book is either about a serial killer or an urban legend come to life, that sense of menace is already built in to the narrative well enough. But the conclusion is largely satisfying, playing well off the dynamics Veste established over the course of the story.
A solid sense of place, a looming sense of menace: a frequently gripping read.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4926-7129-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
