An absorbing tale of damaged souls struggling to heal as they track down evil.
A famous mystery author who’s spiraling downward agrees to hunt for a real murderer, hoping the search will result in a blockbuster book.
In Klein’s suspense novel, Kit Wheaton corners author and New Yorker Philip Raymond. She asks him to do what California private investigators and police couldn’t: Find who’s responsible for her teenage daughter Paige’s death. Kit explains to Raymond: “Your stories are as real as life. And you understand people, you see though them, and into them.” A photograph taken before Paige wound up dead on a California beach shows the teen in bed with a man whose face is obscured. Raymond enlarges the picture and discovers the word Rosebudnotched in the bed’s wooden headboard. Digging into the internet, he learns that politically connected billionaire Lee Fletcher owns a yacht by that name. Raymond figures if he could “tie Fletcher to the death of Paige Wheaton, that would make quite a book.” Suffering from anxiety stemming from the loss of his reputation and his wife and son, who moved to California, Raymond realizes he can’t investigate Fletcher alone. The author hires Jesse Carter, an attractive law school dropout, to double as his assistant and as bait for Fletcher. Carter has her own issues, stemming from a family tragedy. Now living hand-to-mouth in a Greenwich Village walk-up, she hooks up with Fletcher. A truly bad man, he takes a page from the playbook of Jeffrey Epstein, the multimillionaire sex offender linked to underage girls. Fletcher calls his girls “celestials.” “This is a kind of weird vibe,” says one of them at a gathering. The same could be said of this novel, which includes drug use in coffins, “jizz-stained pants,” and a surplus of hypodermic needles. Descriptions can be rich, such as the one of Fletcher having “something brawling and feral about him, something dangerous, that seemed to want to burst.” Or they can be perplexing: “His nose jutted out like a tiny fist.” Raymond’s repeated phrase, “Man plans and God laughs,” wears a bit thin. But the book expertly unspools the backstories of Raymond and Carter, blending them into their present-day search for a predator. And as a New York resident, Klein convincingly guides his characters around the city.
An absorbing tale of damaged souls struggling to heal as they track down evil.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 394
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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