This latest stand-alone from the chronicler of attorney Andy Carpenter (Leader of the Pack, 2012, etc.) is two-thirds...
If a New Jersey state cop can’t prove within a week that the murder suspect he shot dead was innocent, his brother will pay the price.
When a knife attack ends rising legal star Daniel Brennan’s life just before he’s scheduled to move up from the Superior Court bench to the Court of Appeals, Lt. Lucas Somers catches the case. The judge’s murder is so high-profile that Luke’s boss gives him extra resources, extra leeway and extra pressure. The very first lead Luke pursues—three-time drug offender Steven Gallagher, whom Brennan had promised a stiff sentence—turns up trumps for Luke, though not so much for Steven, whom Luke shoots three times as Steven, cornered in his Paterson apartment, raises his gun. It’s clearly a righteous shooting, and Luke is rewarded with congratulations, television interviews and the kidnapping of his brother, Bryan, by Steven’s brother, Chris, a Marine who flew home from Afghanistan to help Steven face his legal woes and now intends to deal with his death by taking the life of his killer’s brother, whom he’s chained in an underground shelter with a TV, a computer, some food and enough air for seven days. Can Luke rise to Chris Gallagher’s challenge and collect enough evidence of Steven’s innocence to save his own brother’s life? Acting on another hunch, he quickly satisfies himself that the real reason for Judge Brennan’s death was a civil suit concerning fracking in upstate New York. But Luke will need every one of his enviable law enforcement contacts in order to determine just which of the many interested parties was determined to tip the scales of justice.
This latest stand-alone from the chronicler of attorney Andy Carpenter (Leader of the Pack, 2012, etc.) is two-thirds perfectly controlled suspense, one-third scrambled windup.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02476-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
Twisty and propulsive.
A first date takes a sinister turn for a troubled young woman in Walker’s third psychological thriller.
It’s the day after Laura Lochner’s date with a man she met online, and she hasn’t returned to the Connecticut home of her sister, Rosie, her brother-in-law, Joe, and their little boy, Mason, where she’s been staying after a bad breakup. Rosie fears the worst, but Joe advises caution. After all, Laura is an adult and can have some fun, right? But Rosie has a bad feeling. Laura won’t answer her phone, and Rosie only has more questions after poking around online for info on Laura’s date, Jonathan Fields. Rosie eventually calls the police, and events begin to cascade like dominoes. Interspersed with Rosie’s attempt to trace Laura’s movements and get a handle on the guy she went out with is Laura’s first-person account of the actual date as well as enlightening snippets of sessions between Laura and her therapist. Laura’s is the most compelling part—a tormented, often prickly piece of storytelling by a woman carrying the pain of a horrible event that happened in high school and feelings of abandonment by a father who always seemed to love Rosie more. Laura’s desire to be loved is all-consuming, but her conviction that she is not worthy of love is heartbreaking. She sees subterfuge in nearly everything Jonathan says and does. Meanwhile, Rosie must come to terms with some ugly surprises of her own as she digs into their past. As the timelines inevitably converge, Walker’s clever misdirection paves the way to a truly chilling finale, and she has plenty of insightful things to say about the blame placed on women by society and themselves for the idiotic, careless, and sometimes downright evil things men do.
Twisty and propulsive.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-19867-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
An engrossing and haunting psychological thriller.
A young newlywed's life is upended, and a picturesque neighborhood is shattered, when she is suspected of a savage murder.
At the beginning of a new year, Joey Mullen moves back to England from Ibiza with Alfie, her husband, whom she hastily married out of grief over the death of her mother. Jack, Joey’s older brother, invites the young couple to move into his painted Victorian house in the upscale Bristol neighborhood of Melville Heights so they can get on their feet financially and help with the baby that Jack and his wife, Rebecca, are expecting. Joey quickly becomes infatuated with their neighbor Tom Fitzwilliam, a new headmaster charged with improving the local school. Her crush only intensifies when Alfie suggests having a baby, and Joey begins to suspect her marriage was a mistake. Meanwhile, Tom’s wife, Nicola, struggles to fill her days and remains oblivious to their son, Freddie, who regularly spies on his neighbors and the village's teenage schoolgirls, taking their photos and keeping a detailed log of everyone's activities. This surveillance exacerbates the paranoia and mental illness of another neighbor, the mother of 16-year-old Jenna, one of Tom’s students. Jenna’s mother is convinced that she knows the Fitzwilliam family from a vacation incident years earlier (and that the family is now stalking her), but Jenna is more concerned that Tom may be having an inappropriate relationship with her best friend. After several months, tension in the neighborhood explodes, and Joey is suspected of a brutal murder. However, as the police gather evidence, it becomes clear how many secrets each family has been hiding. Jewell (Then She Was Gone, 2017, etc.) adeptly weaves together a complex array of characters in her latest thriller. The novel opens with the murder investigation and deftly maintains its intensity and brisk pace even as the story moves through different moments in time over the previous three months. Jewell’s use of third-person narration allows her to explore each family’s anxieties and sorrows, which ultimately makes this novel’s ending all the more unsettling.
An engrossing and haunting psychological thriller.Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9007-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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