An effectively atmospheric crime novel that pits no-nonsense cops against wicked Massachusetts magic.
A New England cop uncovers a cabal of witches in Cavignano’s second supernatural thriller in a series.
Boston police detective Ray Hanley has been dispatched to Salem, Massachusetts, where a young woman—his captain’s niece—has gone missing. Nineteen-year-old Cassie Barnes had plenty of reasons to run away: A planned year in Europe fell through when her best friend was institutionalized, she hated living with her short-tempered parents, and her older boyfriend had just broken up with her. But would she really just disappear? Local Salem cop Elena Martinez is none too happy that Ray has joined the case, which is her first as a newly minted detective. Their styles don’t mesh well, given Martinez’s meticulous notetaking and Ray’s gut-based approach: “Half of detective work is identifying clues and following the facts,” Ray says, “but the other half is abstract. Like when you see one of those paintings that’s all blurry up close but turns into a portrait when you move farther back.” They soon discover that Cassie and her institutionalized friend had recently become involved in Salem’s not-insubstantial occult scene, which makes use of a secret system of tunnels beneath the town to perform its rituals—and something sinister seems to be planned for Halloween, only a few days away. Can Ray and Elena locate Cassie before it’s too late? Cavignano’s novel hits all the procedural beats that crime-fiction fans will be looking for, and his fictionalized version of Salem makes for a wonderfully spooky backdrop. The case even leads the cops through a classic haunted house attraction in town: “A colony of bats streaked toward them, their mechanical wings flapping as they zipped along an invisible wire. Some flew low enough to catch in their hair or strike the backs of their heads with soft, rubbery thuds.” The supernatural elements are also well deployed, introducing a bit of the unexpected into this hard-boiled mystery.
An effectively atmospheric crime novel that pits no-nonsense cops against wicked Massachusetts magic.Pub Date: Feb. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781733873321
Page Count: 410
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.
A snap of the yo-yo string yanks Harry Bosch out of retirement yet again.
Los Angeles Councilman Jake Pearlman has resurrected the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit in order to reopen the case of his kid sister, Sarah, whose 1994 murder was instantly eclipsed in the press by the O.J. Simpson case when it broke a day later. Since not even a councilor can reconstitute a police unit for a single favored case, Det. Renée Ballard and her mostly volunteer (read: unpaid) crew are expected to reopen some other cold cases as well, giving Bosch a fresh opportunity to gather evidence against Finbar McShane, the crooked manager he’s convinced executed industrial contractor Stephen Gallagher, his wife, and their two children in 2013 and buried them in a single desert grave. The case has haunted Bosch more than any other he failed to close, and he’s fine to work the Pearlman homicide if it’ll give him another crack at McShane. As it turns out, the Pearlman case is considerably more interesting—partly because the break that leads the unit to a surprising new suspect turns out to be both fraught and misleading, partly because identifying the killer is only the beginning of Bosch’s problems. The windup of the Gallagher murders, a testament to sweating every detail and following every lead wherever it goes, is more heartfelt but less wily and dramatic. Fans of the aging detective who fear that he might be mellowing will be happy to hear that “putting him on a team did not make him a team player.”
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-48565-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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