In a departure from his superlative police procedurals (Cold Bones, 2019, etc.), Mark produces a stand-alone psychological...
A lifetime of secrets is slowly revealed in this intricate look into past murders and present-day guilt.
October 1967 finds Cordelia Hemlock lonely and grief-stricken in the remote area of the Scottish borderlands hard by Hadrian’s Wall, mourning her young son who recently died. While lying in a cemetery one day, she’s approached by Felicity Goose, a local woman destined to become her lifelong friend. Cordelia and her rarely seen husband bought a house in the area where they were raising Cordelia's son, Stefan, the product of a short-lived university affair that could never end in marriage. Instead, Cordelia accepted an offer of support for Stefan and herself from a gay, highly placed government official who needed a wife for cover. The area residents’ dismissal of Cordelia as a snob has softened since she lost her child. Now, when a sudden storm catches the two women in the graveyard, a lightning strike fells a tree, destroying a small crypt and revealing not only ancient bones, but the body of a much newer corpse in a dark suit. Recovering in Felicity’s house, Cordelia meets a neighbor named Fairfax Duke, who agrees to go to the cemetery to see the body Felicity doesn’t want to admit exists. When Fairfax doesn't return to Felicity's house, it turns out that he's been killed in a car crash. The other body has disappeared, but the police ask no questions, so Cordelia finds a new purpose in life investigating what she assumes is a murder. Since the death of his son in World War II, Fairfax had never stopped asking questions and writing the stories of everyone in the area who would talk to him, and now he’s left a rich lode of information for Cordelia. Many of the people he interviewed are local, but some just never left the area after being released from a POW camp during World War II. As the story shifts from the 1960s to 2010, appalling secrets come to light, putting Cordelia in jeopardy while changing her life in unimaginable ways.
In a departure from his superlative police procedurals (Cold Bones, 2019, etc.), Mark produces a stand-alone psychological thriller, character-driven but with plenty of bizarre twists, that’s sure to please fans of Catriona McPherson.Pub Date: June 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8872-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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