Readers introduced to Nova's new hero (is he a hero?) will be eager for his return.
The first in a Tinseltown-noir series by a veteran novelist.
Nova plainly had some fun with this, and the reader likely will as well. This isn’t exactly a mystery, because it's apparent early on who the bad guy is. Terry Peregrine is a vacuous, pretty-boy actor with a taste for underage girls. The very first sentence finds protagonist Quinn Farrell sensing that “Terry was thinking about killing the girl from Alaska.” Is Farrell the good guy? (Is anyone?) He’s a fixer, someone who makes problems go away. He has a vending-machine company that helps him launder cash, and he often seems to have five grand on him to persuade those who present a problem to disappear. The girl from Alaska represents a problem for Terry, and she wants way more than five grand to disappear. Farrell works for the producer of the film that Terry is currently shooting, and that producer’s goals may or may not align with Terry’s. Much of what plot there is involves these elements—cash, disappearance, pedophilia, the possibility of murder. Farrell has a bit of a stutter, which embarrasses him, and a triggering impulse toward fury, which he does his best to keep under control. He is deeply intuitive, surprisingly philosophical and well-read, and a bit of a romantic. He falls for his neighbor who has just moved in, and her work with teenagers who have terminal cancer gives them both some perspective on life’s big issues. Interconnecting subplots feature a python, a potentially rabid raccoon, a pair of Russian bagman thugs, a detective who once arrested Farrell and now occasionally helps him, and more girls who become involved with Terry. The insidious glitter and evil of Los Angeles and the promises and betrayals of Hollywood inevitably loom large, and a dark, bittersweet humor marks the tone. None of the corpses comes as much of a surprise, and there isn’t much crime-solving involved, but lively writing and colorful characters keep the reader engaged.
Readers introduced to Nova's new hero (is he a hero?) will be eager for his return.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-950691-22-7
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.
The loss of her police officer father and the discovery of an abandoned car in a local lake raise chilling questions regarding a young woman’s family history.
When Hazel Sharp returns to her hometown of Mirror Lake, North Carolina, for her father’s memorial, she and the other townspeople are confronted by a challenging double whammy: As they’re grieving the loss of beloved longtime police officer Detective Perry Holt, a disturbing sight appears in the lake, whose waterline is receding because of an ongoing drought—an old, unidentifiable car, which has likely been lurking there for years. Hazel temporarily leaves her Charlotte-based building-renovation business in the capable hands of her partners and reconnects with her brothers, Caden and Gage; her Uncle Roy; her old fling and neighbor, Nico; and her schoolfriend, Jamie, now a mother and married to Caden. Tiny, relentless suspicions rise to the metaphorical surface along with that waterlogged vehicle: There have been a slew of minor break-ins; two people go missing; and then, a second abandoned car is discovered. The novel digs deeper into Hazel’s family history—her father was a widow when he married Hazel’s mother, who later left the family, absconding with money and jewels—and Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation: “Everything mattered disproportionately in a small town. Your success, but also your failure. Everyone knows might as well have been our town motto.”
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668010440
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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