An intriguing murder mystery that readers will rush to finish.
In Barr’s thriller, a woman unravels a family history of deceit.
Grace Rendell is the daughter of a sadistic billionaire and is married to a man who’s successful and handsome but wants nothing to do with her physically or emotionally. Grace has been in therapy with Dr. Emma Leighmann since she was young, when her father had her committed to a mental institution. She regularly prescribes Grace a cocktail of psychotropic medications, thus keeping her heavily sedated. In the novel’s opening scene, Grace stands over the dead body of the successful mystery writer who goes by the name Lynn Andrews, which leads the reader to wonder if she’s had a psychotic break. Or is she actually more stable than her supposed caregivers acknowledge? The novel then jumps back to four months earlier, when Grace is in the process of weaning herself off her prescription medication and starting to realize that her marriage may not be what it seems. Determined to seize control of her life and her narrative, Grace joins a writing group where she meets Lynn. The women become friends, and Lynn agrees to help Grace write her mystery novel—not realizing that the troubled woman’s book is a thinly veiled account of her husband and her father, who may well be plotting her demise. Barr’s psychological thriller is expertly paced as it oscillates between Grace’s seemingly valid suspicions and her paranoia, and the author slowly builds the character’s credibility as the story goes on. She also develops other intriguing characters, such as Lynn’s brother, Joe “Hack” Hackford, who struggles with his own financial troubles. His desperation, and Grace’s, will cause them to bond in unexpected ways. Barr’s narrative can, at times, feel slightly over-the-top due its its elaborate web of conniving players. However, it’s still a wild ride whose propulsive energy will keep readers turning pages.
An intriguing murder mystery that readers will rush to finish.Pub Date: July 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68433-556-5
Page Count: 255
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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