Dark and juicy, the middle entry in Sáenz’s epic trilogy immerses readers in a vibrant, dangerous city.
A righteous police inspector is propelled into examining his past while facing personal and professional challenges in the present.
In the Spanish city of Vitoria, Inspector Unai López de Ayala, known as Kraken, gets a double whammy from his lover and boss, Deputy Superintendent Alba Díaz de Salvatierra: She’s pregnant, and the father might not be him but her dead husband, Nancho, a serial killer. His pursuit of Nancho in The Silence of the White City (2020) left Kraken with serious head injuries that have impaired his ability to speak. Though he narrates in a gritty first person, he regularly visits a speech therapist and rarely talks to others, preferring to conduct conversations in the texts peppered throughout. A message from Kraken’s partner, Estíbaliz, brings more bad news: Kraken’s first girlfriend, graphic novelist Ana Belén Liaño, has been murdered. Intermittent flashbacks to 1992 present their idyllic teen romance and provide an intriguing counterpoint to the main noir narrative. Sáenz’s large, boldly painted canvas includes a plague of inexplicable suicides by young women. Kraken’s collaboration with his own group of colorful irregulars—hacker extraordinaire Golden Girl; Tasio Ortiz de Zárate, long imprisoned as a serial killer but exonerated; street-wise skater MatuSalem; and others—is this story’s most enjoyable feature. The murder of one of Kraken’s old friends indicates both that he’s dealing with a serial killer and that he might be the killer’s focus.
Dark and juicy, the middle entry in Sáenz’s epic trilogy immerses readers in a vibrant, dangerous city.Pub Date: March 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-9848-9861-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A slow-burn mystery held together by an admirable cast of strong, flawed women.
A young woman returns as police chief of her hometown in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens only to find herself challenged by a local drug ring and a haunting cold case.
Chief Callie Hauser has been back in Pine Lakes only a few months when she has to arrest her mother for drunk driving. Jenna’s struggles with addiction shaped much of Callie’s childhood, but she never knew their root. Now she finds out that when Jenna was 16, she discovered a dead baby in the woods. Investigating the Baby Doe case leads Callie to a long-missing teenager, Sabrina Riley, but overall, her attention is occupied by more recent concerns: an uptick in the number of drug overdoses in town; her friend Jane’s slow recovery from a recent hit-and-run; and the fact that Jenna goes missing after being released from jail. Stretched to the breaking point, Callie finds some solace in Adrian, a cute scientist she meets by the river, but she can’t help worrying that the old case and new case are connected—particularly when she discovers that she and Baby Doe share DNA. Mullen plays a bit with perspective and time, choosing to narrate some chapters from another character’s point of view as well as to experiment with second-person narration, but this is truly Callie’s story. Mullen doesn’t shy away from exploring the echoes of trauma within families and communities, and the way some stories are ignored or silenced, but Callie’s strength and moral compass ground the darker aspects of the novel. Like so many modern thrillers, this is a tale about the things men do that hurt women, both casually and with vicious intent, but through Callie, Mullen also offers hope that by standing alongside one another, women not only survive, but preserve the stories of those they have lost.
A slow-burn mystery held together by an admirable cast of strong, flawed women.Pub Date: June 9, 2026
ISBN: 9781250400574
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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