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
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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