by David Wiltse ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001
The stage brogue Billy keeps slipping into at every sign of trouble (“She calls me an eedjit, and still I love the woman”),...
Sturdy, predictable thriller about a traumatized Secret Service agent who retires to his cozy midwestern hometown—only to find it honeycombed with the violence he thought he’d left behind in this.
Long after the confrontation with a demented terrorist who killed his partner and nearly killed him, Billy Tree still wakens with night sweats. And no wonder, since the conspirator who ended his career has nothing on the threats to the Nebraska peace. A bunch of nasty bikers are clearly peddling drugs, and a pair of trash-talking gangbangers seems to have every intention of getting in on their action. Closer to home, there’s Duane Blanchard, the mean, skilled battler who’s never let go of Joan, the school nurse who divorced him, and Curtis Metzger, his big, ferocious pal—not to mention Curtis’s Nazi-loving son Sandy, who becomes Sheriff Pat Kunkel’s chief suspect the minute the smoke clears from the killing of school principal Thom Cohan (already taunted by the Metzgers for his allegedly Jewish name before he was shot along with an inoffensive teacher during a pre–school-year meeting). Kunkel, insisting that Billy’s Secret Service background gives him an expertise the sheriff sorely needs, inveigles Billy into tagging along on the investigation. But Billy, who’s never quite stopped carrying a torch for Joan Blanchard, can feel himself slipping into another, even less comfortable role as her latest lover—and the next target of her ex’s murderous rage. If none of this sounds very original, Wiltse pumps it up efficiently, revealing some dastardly new secret every 40 pages or so, and tying the formula intrigue conscientiously into domestic small-town travails.
The stage brogue Billy keeps slipping into at every sign of trouble (“She calls me an eedjit, and still I love the woman”), however, shows how much Wiltse’s taken off the intensity of his ultra-tough thrillers about the FBI’s John Becker (Blown Away, 1996, etc.)Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26957-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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.
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.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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