A second outing for Seattle parapsychologist Cree Black (City of Masks, 2003) takes her to New Mexico, where an investigation unveils mysteries that have nothing supernatural about them.
Cree is a kind of latter-day exorcist who roams the world seeking the ruin of ghosts—or entities, as she calls them. At an academic conference in Albuquerque, she’s waylaid by one of her old professors, who begs her to look into a particularly troubling case. It seems that young Tommy Keeday, a student at a local boarding school for Navajos, has been tormented for some time now by inexplicable seizures that overtake him without warning and disappear without explanation. The school principal, Julietta McCarty, explains that Tommy is extremely bright and has never been in any serious trouble—physically or academically—before. Tommy’s family is afraid he’s possessed by some dead ancestor, but Cree likes to think in terms of fields, entities, and environments, and in the course of her investigation she finds plenty of psychic disturbance in the general vicinity. Julietta founded the school with the proceeds of her divorce settlement from hated ex-husband Garrett McCarty, a rich miner whose son Donny (four years older than Julietta) had always resented his father’s young trophy bride. There’ve been reported cases of cattle mutilation (a phenomenon associated with aliens and UFOs) on Donny’s property adjacent to the school, and Cree meets with stiff resistance in her attempts to investigate. She also learns that Julietta had secretly had a son by her Navajo lover some 15 years before (while still married to Garrett) and had reluctantly given him up for adoption. Garrett’s accidental death a few years after the divorce looks suspicious, too. Are we dealing with ghosts—or just a bunch of family skeletons?
Hecht writes fluidly and draws convincing portraits of some interesting characters and situations, but the parapsychology slant drives his tale into a swamp of New Age hooey.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-393-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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Murder and mayhem plague a film set on a secluded island off the coast of Delaware in Little’s (Dear Daughter, 2015, etc.) sophomore thriller.
When film editor Marissa Dahl takes a job on a new film directed by the talented but temperamental Tony Rees, she’s not given a script and must sign a mile-long nondisclosure agreement. It’s not ideal, but she needs the work. Escorted by an attractive ex–Navy SEAL named Isaiah, Marissa arrives on Kickout Island to find a bustling set, headquartered at a beautiful hotel, that is cloaked in secrecy and beset with dysfunction. Once Marissa gets down to work, she realizes that picking up the slack from the previous editor, who was fired for unknown reasons, won’t be smooth sailing and that the movie is based on the real-life unsolved murder of aspiring actress Caitlyn Kelly 25 years ago on that very island. Most folks assume that an eccentric ferry captain named Billy Lyle, a friend of Caitlyn’s, was the killer, but there was never enough evidence to convict. A few people, however, think he may be innocent. Marissa sets out to discover what really happened to Caitlyn with the help of Isaiah and two intrepid, tech-savvy 13-year-olds—Grace Portillo and Suzy Koh, whose parents work for the hotel. What she finds is a dead body and a whole lot of trouble. Readers fascinated with the behind-the-scenes machinations of a movie set will be enthralled, plus there’s a frisson of romantic tension between Isaiah and Marissa, and the island setting lends some spooky atmosphere. Snippets from Grace and Suzy’s true-crime podcast, Dead Ringer, are also sprinkled throughout. Though a killer on the loose adds a fair bit of urgency in the second half, the main focus is on Little’s singular narrator. Marissa relates to the world primarily through film and considers herself anything but typical: “It’s possible I’ve spent so much time watching movies that the language of film has infiltrated some primal, necessary part of my brain. I catch myself processing my own emotions in scenes, in shots, in dialogue.”
A quirky and distinctive heroine headlines this fun and fast-paced thriller loaded with cinematic flourishes.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-670-01639-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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