by Colin Kersey ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 20, 2021
A polished, cinematic crime tale that’s both edge-of-your-seat thrilling and seamlessly entertaining.
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A newly married Southern California couple become embroiled in a tangled web of embezzlement and mob money.
After the success of his well-received spiritual/supernatural debut, Soul Catcher (1995), Kersey’s second novel follows landscaper Grayson Reynolds and his wife, Heide, a hedge fund associate. They are struggling through their first year of marriage, wedged within the suffocating grip of household debt. Believing she has the ultimate answer, Heide, together with her boss, hatches a plan to covertly pilfer $100 million, putting it into a Cayman Islands bank. Her secret is violently exposed when the couple, on a yacht with Heide’s boss, are attacked by a gun-toting female assassin who kills everyone onboard except Gray, who narrowly escapes. An FBI interrogation reveals the money Heide diverted belonged to the Sinaloa cartel, a ruthless and viciously cutthroat Mexican crime syndicate that wants its laundered drug money returned, at any cost. Terrified and desperate to escape into obscurity, Gray, in an ultimate act of self-preservation, goes into hiding in the Cascade Mountains north of Seattle at a trout hatchery owned by a kindhearted family. Country life as a farmhand suits Gray well, but Kersey knows how to keep the tension taut as the inevitable end to the protagonist’s self-imposed concealment casts gloom over every move he makes. The blooming romantic affections for Gray from two sisters cause the kinds of complications he doesn’t need as he tries to crack the password to his murdered wife’s Cayman Islands bank account and keep the money for himself. Gray is a reliable narrator, and though the plot is simple, it’s also engrossing. The author keeps his list of characters compact and his plot kinetic and tightly spring-loaded with plenty of surprises to keep readers on their toes. By the time Heide’s past comes back to haunt Gray, readers will be more than ready for the unavoidable rush of mob-fueled revenge to descend on the bucolic farmland. The rousing finale pits Gray against an adversary in a bullet-riddled face-off filled with breathless suspense.
A polished, cinematic crime tale that’s both edge-of-your-seat thrilling and seamlessly entertaining.Pub Date: July 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63752-865-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Riley Sager ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 2022
A weird, wild ride.
Celebrity scandal and a haunted lake drive the narrative in this bestselling author’s latest serving of subtly ironic suspense.
Sager’s debut, Final Girls (2017), was fun and beautifully crafted. His most recent novels—Home Before Dark (2020) and Survive the Night (2021) —have been fun and a bit rickety. His new novel fits that mold. Narrator Casey Fletcher grew up watching her mother dazzle audiences, and then she became an actor herself. While she never achieves the “America’s sweetheart” status her mother enjoyed, Casey makes a career out of bit parts in movies and on TV and meatier parts onstage. Then the death of her husband sends her into an alcoholic spiral that ends with her getting fired from a Broadway play. When paparazzi document her substance abuse, her mother exiles her to the family retreat in Vermont. Casey has a dry, droll perspective that persists until circumstances overwhelm her, and if you’re getting a Carrie Fisher vibe from Casey Fletcher, that is almost certainly not an accident. Once in Vermont, she passes the time drinking bourbon and watching the former supermodel and the tech mogul who live across the lake through a pair of binoculars. Casey befriends Katherine Royce after rescuing her when she almost drowns and soon concludes that all is not well in Katherine and Tom’s marriage. Then Katherine disappears….It would be unfair to say too much about what happens next, but creepy coincidences start piling up, and eventually, Casey has to face the possibility that maybe some of the eerie legends about Lake Greene might have some truth to them. Sager certainly delivers a lot of twists, and he ventures into what is, for him, new territory. Are there some things that don’t quite add up at the end? Maybe, but asking that question does nothing but spoil a highly entertaining read.
A weird, wild ride.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18319-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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