Riveting read about real-life Nancy Drews that seems destined for the big or small screen.
An amateur crime-solving collective blows open a 15-year-old double-murder mystery.
In the summer of 2005, the bodies of a Los Angeles–area businessman and his wife, who had been missing for a month, were discovered 300 feet above a car graveyard in the Angeles National Forest, where their Ford Explorer had tumbled over a steep cliff from the highway above. In 2019 a young mother named Marissa (only first names of the principles are used, and all others are given aliases for reasons that eventually become clear), hoping to start a new career in TV journalism, happened to see video of the Explorer being pulled from the gorge by a California Highway Patrol helicopter. She recognized the location and almost instantly became obsessed with the idea that she could solve this unsolved mystery. In the winter of 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, Marissa, naïve and lacking in confidence, assembled a team of three other moms of young children who were as excited by the challenge of the case as she was. Each brought unique strengths, keen intelligence, sharp humor, and a healthy dash of chutzpah. Hogan, who wrote Prince of Thieves (the basis of Ben Affleck’s film The Town), has crafted a page-turning true-crime thriller about this unlikely band of investigators, who reconstructed from scratch the complicated web of financial misdeeds, family treachery, and investigative dead ends that had rendered the official case against the prime suspects un-prosecutable. Hogan writes, “Their ability as women to get people to trust and confide in them things that they would not share with law enforcement figures was their superpower in investigating and breaking this case.”
Riveting read about real-life Nancy Drews that seems destined for the big or small screen.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733226
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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