A finely wrought and deeply disturbing work of psychological terror.
An abused woman is pushed to the point of fracture in Murray’s literary horror novel.
Bernadette “Birdie” Black lives in fear of setting off her boyfriend Russ Swinbank’s explosive temper. He flies into a rage if she doesn’t make a dinner he likes, for instance, and she’s afraid to tell him about her plans to go to nursing school. “He loves me,” she insists to her best friend, who regularly encourages Birdie to leave him. “He does! He just has a hard time showing it.” On some level, Birdie feels that she deserves Russ’ cruelty: She blames herself for the accidental death of her son, Noah, and for an affair that she had that destroyed her first marriage. As Birdie works around Russ’ moods—and his frequent nights away from the house—she frets over her future, experiments with a grief group, and even reconnects with her ex-husband, Noah’s father. As her story unfolds, the novel intersperses chapters from the viewpoints of other women—all victims of a local serial killer, including one who’s already dead and moldering in the woods. Can Birdie overcome her self-hatred enough to save herself from Russ, or is she, like the victims of the killer stalking her community, caught in a trap that will inevitably destroy her? Murray writes with a horror novelist’s sense of tension and dread. Her skills are particularly on display in the chapters about the killer’s victims, as in this passage about a woman named Maeve: “she’d left a window cracked and a man she’d seen four days before at a gas station, a stranger who’d eyed her up and down and given her the creeps, had checked every door and window each day since he followed her home.” The book also persuasively dramatizes the mindset of an abused person, and although it takes her situation to its darkest extremes, it never abandons a sense of emotional verisimilitude.
A finely wrought and deeply disturbing work of psychological terror.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9781954899216
Page Count: 336
Publisher: SmallPub
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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