A compact, harrowing story of a vengeful curse unleashed.
In Bills’ novella, a small town’s racist past demands a reckoning.
Billy Dunphee, sheriff of the county that contains the tiny town of Harkin, Texas, is called to investigate a mysterious event: Edna Jenkins, calling from Troup, an even smaller town, is alarmed because something bizarre has happened to her grandfather, Tieg Bertram, who has only recently returned to the Harkin area. When Sheriff Dunphee arrives, he finds a pile of ashes on a bed (“I don’t mean to be indelicate, but I have to ask,” Dunphee says to Edna. “You didn’t do this, did you?”). Strange as it seems, Bertram appears to be the victim of spontaneous combustion. Sheriff Dunphee is still reeling when he mentions it to local diner owner Nat, who gives him another surprise: Bertram had been part of a horrible crime a generation ago, when seven young Harkin men lynched a Black man named Pettigrew Smith—on the damning accusation of Dunphee’s own grandmother. “Harkin wasn’t big enough for secrets,” Dunphee believed, but now, “he suddenly felt like he had no idea where he was from or who the people he grew up with were.” A seemingly impossible threat is stalking the surviving participants in that long-ago crime, with Sheriff Dunphee caught in the middle. From this fraught premise, Bills crafts a very effective thriller that adroitly doubles as a meditation on the region’s blood-drenched racial history. (“The game went on and on,” Nat tells Dunphee. “White folks just kept going, running up the score – and black folks just kept on dyin.’”) In quick, deft strokes, Bills crafts a believable cast, ratchets up the tension, and provides a thoroughly satisfying twist at the end of the tale. This short, powerful story is first-rate, thinking person’s horror writing.
A compact, harrowing story of a vengeful curse unleashed.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9798218252229
Page Count: 86
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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
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