by Deborah Goodrich Royce ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019
A compelling, well-written thriller with an effective, twisty plot.
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In this literary thriller, a privileged woman’s life unravels when a figure from her past seeks her out.
In 2014, Watch Hill, Rhode Island, is a moneyed summer haven of yachts and “fifteen-bedroom ‘cottages.’ ” For middle-aged Susan Ford, née Bentley, it’s the 18th summer she’s spent there since meeting her husband, Jack, who died five years ago. With her friend (and stepson) Jack Jr., Susan helps to run a real estate business. The last thing she expects on a calm morning in August is a visit from the FBI, and questions about a man named Samuel Fakhouri. She claims not to know him—but when agents picked him up, arriving in Boston from Baghdad, he had Susan’s name and address on him. She stalls the feds so that she can visit her Fifth Avenue apartment in New York City, where she retrieves an old white envelope and a gun from a safe. When she meets again with the FBI, she’s ready to admit that she once knew Sammy, and the narrative moves to 1979 and suburban Detroit. Back then, Susan was an ambitious college student working at Frankie’s Disco for the summer with her friend Annie Nelson. Annie is bold, “impossibly beautiful,” and impulsive, and an unlikely pal for studious, serious Susan. Through Annie, Susan meets Sammy, a handsome Chaldean Catholic from a village near Mosul, Iraq. He’s one of the regulars at Frankie’s, and when he later takes her on a date, Susan doesn’t mind when she notices that “a gun had peeked out from Sammy’s waistband when he leaned in to kiss her.” In fact, the element of danger only seems to make him more attractive to her. As the past haunts the present, Susan must confront the secrets, lies, and choices that she made before she became Mrs. Ford. Royce, an actress and a story editor for Miramax, imbues her debut novel with plenty of drama, suspense, and sharp observations. For example, in the scenes set in 1979, she has Susan study “the indigenous peoples of Frankie’s” like a social scientist: “Italian-American men, Chaldean men, odd unaffiliated men, and pretty girls…leggy all-Americans, whose parents neither knew nor cared where they went on hot summer nights.” In 2014, she’s still noticing similarly telling details, as when she describes Jack Jr.’s seersucker suit as “just the right level of rumpled. His bowtie and pocket square are in matching yellow silk with a tiny pattern of Labrador Retrievers.” The other characters’ reminiscences and backstories, too, help to establish them as three-dimensional personalities. The novel’s sense of time and place, whether in Detroit or Manhattan, or in the 1970s or the 2010s, is always vivid and well-rendered. At first, it will be unclear to the reader why Susan is so filled with dread, as even the memories of 1979 seem fairly innocuous at first. However, Royce cleverly builds up troubling circumstances that drive toward a dramatic twist, which readers will find to be both plausible and unexpected.
A compelling, well-written thriller with an effective, twisty plot.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64293-172-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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