An absorbing tale and an adept examination of grief.
A mother hunts for her daughter’s killer in Kane’s latest psychological thriller in a series.
Dr. Mollie Roar was once a successful psychologist working at Napa State Hospital in California. However, the kidnapping and murder of her 15-year-old daughter, Dakota, two years ago led to the dissolution of Mollie’s marriage to Dakota’s father, Cole, and now Mollie spends much of her time drinking or going to a support group for grieving parents. There, she finds solace in her friend and occasional lover, Grant Sawyer. Dakota’s murder is still unsolved, but rumor has it that the perpetrator is the Shadow Man, a prolific serial killer who’s local to Napa. When terminally ill Vietnam veteran Wendall Grady begins seeing Mollie as a therapy client to confess his past sins, he reveals information that fuels her desire to further investigate her daughter’s murder. A parallel plotline set before the teen’s death shows Dakota’s increasing interest in serial killers—the Shadow Man, in particular—and her involvement in an online sleuthing forum. Mollie, in the present, learns more about her child and tries to piece the truth together while coming to terms with her own guilt about her flawed parenting. Kane’s stellar fourth book in her Doctors of Darkness series stays true to the conventions of the thriller genre, building anticipation and exploring untrustworthy characters, without ever feeling formulaic. Mollie’s chapters, in particular, are filled with anguish: “The drawer stays shut, but I know the past is alive inside it. It’s unburied now. And it may as well be a hand clawing up from its shallow grave to seize me by the throat.” The juxtaposition of Dakota’s investigations into the Shadow Man works very well and effectively develops a sense of intrigue. The teenager isn’t merely a murder victim, but a well-developed character; she reluctantly learns that her parents are imperfect, deals with boys who want too much too soon, and has disagreements with her best friend. Mollie is also a fully realized figure who’s both unlikable and sympathetic, by turns.
An absorbing tale and an adept examination of grief.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73-367015-9
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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