A suspenseful tale that effectively combines the power dynamics of South Jersey with terrifying natural threats.
Police detective Mickey Cleary’s investigation of a suspicious kidnapping leads her to danger-filled Crab Island in this seventh book in Waters’ mystery series.
It’s 1979, and Mickey, who was Surf City’s chief of police and is now Long Beach Island’s “one and only detective,” is in a helicopter above the southern New Jersey shoreline. The pilot is Claude Stellwag, who, like her recently deceased husband, is a Vietnam War veteran; he’s also one of her two current suitors. They fly over Crab Island, which features “the twisted timbers and ghostly girders of the once-bustling Fish Factory, known to generations of locals, tourists, fishermen and clammers as the Stinkhouse.” Mickey sees a flash of light coming from the now-abandoned island; this triggers her cop instincts, which she initially ignores. The narrative unfolds in chapters that share thethird-personviewpoints of several key players, by turns. Mickey soon returns to Crab Island with Claude; her other suitor, boat restorer Helly Hansen; and feisty secretary-turned-investigator Genetha Ralstonin tow. Gregory “The Pope” Devine, a man with “big money and a lot of political juice,” asks her to find his son Barry, who went missing a few hours after lunching with Ilsa Schoenweiss, the new CEO of Atlantic City’s Bombay Hotel & Casino. Mickey smells a setup, and, indeed, she ends up having a showdown with Devine’s operatives on Crab Island. She also deals with bumbling youths whose scheme to illegally import supersized coconut crabs goes terribly awry, andeven encounters a hurricane.
South Jersey native Waters packs a lot of wild action and home-state color into this rollicking crime thriller. The story plays out as an entertaining mashup of Elmore Leonard-–sque goon-squad shenanigans and extraordinary Jurassic Park–and Twister-type battles with nature. Over the course of the narrative, the author makes pit stops to opine on Bruce Springsteen’s music, “convenient disappearances” in the notorious Pine Barrens, and the quality of mob-joint pizza. “Adventures were one thing, but the last eighteen hours had been unlike anything she’d ever experienced,” wisecracking Genetha appropriately muses to herself near the end of this novel; at one point, for instance, she and Mickey find themselves perched high upon a shaky ladder on the island’s water tower to escape hurricane flooding. (This prompts their male cohorts to dub them Supergirl and Catwoman.) Along the way, Waters skillfully withholds information from readers and executes slow reveals to great dramatic effect, often employing cliffhanger chapter endings. Mysterious island creatures, for example, are introduced with “a scritching kind of sound—something between scraping and scratching” before readers get to witness their gory impact. The author does an admirable job of weaving elements of Mickey’s complex backstory into the proceedings. However, when the detective is forced to flee at the end of the novel, it feels rather abrupt, and the impetus for her flight is a bit unclear. Presumably, an upcoming installment will clarify such matters.
A suspenseful tale that effectively combines the power dynamics of South Jersey with terrifying natural threats.Pub Date: May 1, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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