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
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
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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