Not knowing who’s listening puts a nation on edge in this engrossing, provocative nail-biter.
A detective investigates a murder and a scary surveillance system in this thriller.
As in previous novels by Crutchley, including Procession(2019), this work set in the near future features an average person who gets drawn into a bizarre situation. The Iliba surveillance system tracks the activities of British citizens through a wrist monitor, with only the elite, such as government leaders, the military, and the police, “Exempt.” Detective Inspector Hubert Plon, an expatriate Frenchman, is one of the Exempt. That starts to change when Plon is assigned to look into a brutal murder. The victim, Adam Weaver, was developing a secret program to use Iliba data to predict people’s future behaviors. Plon locates and copies Weaver’s research. What Plon doesn’t know is that, despite being an Exempt, he too is under surveillance, as his new girlfriend, Freddie Phillips, has been assigned by Defense Intelligence to watch him. He refuses to close the Weaver case as ordered and gets fired as a result, being forced to become one of the Non-Exempt. Plon keeps studying Weaver’s program, but, after an attempt on his life, he and Freddie, who reveals her true identity, go on the run. They discover who is behind the attempt to steal Weaver’s work and seek to spread the word. Crutchley succeeds with this thought-provoking cautionary tale despite not having a particularly likable protagonist. Plon (whom his hated superior Hawley dubs “Plod”) is an earnest, methodical loner who is too arrogant. But he is accomplished at his job, so he gets away with that approach until he crosses the wrong people. His stolid sincerity is enough to get Freddie to flip sides and become an outlaw with him. The author gives a glimpse of what surveillance can become if society isn’t judicious with its use, as Plon is regularly thwarted by those monitoring his “wristpiece.” His journey also enables readers to experience the diversity of the British public. What results is a thrill ride pitting one lone, well-meaning couple against the country’s power-grabbing elite.
Not knowing who’s listening puts a nation on edge in this engrossing, provocative nail-biter.Pub Date: July 26, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-54399-872-4
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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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