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SANCTUARY

Name: SANCTUARY
Author: David G. Hanrahan

A CATALYST FOR MURDER

by David G. Hanrahan ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

A solid, if slanted, legal thriller.

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A private detective investigates the murder of a politician who supported the sanctuary city movement in this third crime novel in a series.

Bill Coine is a former Massachusetts state police homicide detective-turned-private investigator. He’s vacationing with his wife, Jeanie, in the Berkshires when Ted Prescott, the chairperson of the Fairlane, Massachusetts, board of selectmen, is found hanged in the room next door. Coine helps the inexperienced young patrolman who arrives first on the scene by taking photos and giving advice; this annoys police chief Tom Breshetti, who arrives later. The chief seems eager to dismiss the death as a suicide, even though forensic evidence points to murder, so Prescott’s widow hires Coine to investigate. The death is eventually ruled a homicide, possibly with a political motive. Prescott had led the movement to make Fairlane Township a sanctuary city for undocumented immigrants, and he had an enemy in Jonathan Tanner, a fellow selectman who threatened board members, saying, “God help you both if any member of my family is harmed by a person who is in this country illegally and harbored by this town’s idiotic and unlawful law.” Not long afterward, Tanner’s son died during a carjacking by, as he puts it, “a Mexican who came to Fairlane after being deported three times.” But as Coine delves into the case, he uncovers clues that suggest a very different motive. Tanner is suspected again when another selectman is found murdered. He was killed by a crossbow—a weapon that Tanner is known to possess. When Coine finds that Tanner is being railroaded, he decides to work for the defense team. Only his dogged efforts can bring the real killer to justice. Hanrahan (A Deadly Recollection: Bullets from Brooklyn, 2018, etc.) is a former Boston trial attorney, and he clearly draws on that experience here, providing his novel with believable law enforcement and courtroom underpinnings. He handles these technical details well, while also ably wrangling a large cast of characters. In addition, he has a good sense of pacing and delivers engaging dialogue throughout. That said, the novel does tend to overpraise Coine as a character; for example, when he constructs a bulletin board of clues and question marks—a staple of TV, movies, and true-crime stories that will be familiar to many readers—Jeanie is said to be “impressed and overwhelmed” by it; she actually applauds. However, aside from supplying Coine with admiration, hot chocolate, and sandwiches, Jeanie is a cipher. Indeed, female characters play no role in the novel’s policing, detection, or jurisprudence, which, as a narrative decision, feels desperately old-fashioned. On the other hand, the topic of immigration couldn’t be more contemporary, even if some readers may disagree with this novel’s take on it; for example, Fairlane is said to have seen a sharp uptick in sexual and other physical assaults after becoming a sanctuary city. However, real-life, peer-reviewed studies have shown that undocumented immigrants aren’t more likely than anyone else to commit violent crimes.

A solid, if slanted, legal thriller.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 148

Publisher: Kurti Publishing

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2018

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

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Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

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Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.