Twin Peaks meets The Da Vinci Code in this surpassingly weird debut.
Traces of a mysterious young woman cause havoc.
One day Gregory Klein is punching numbers randomly into his telephone; the next, after a cryptic conversation with the stranger on the other end and a visit from the highly suspicious LAPD, he’s chasing across the country to find her. Jackie Savage, abandoned at her high school by the brother who usually picks her up, accepts a ride in a chauffeured limo and is whisked off into a fairy tale gone wrong. Hours after finding a photograph labeled “Hacker-19?” wedged under the pillow of his sofa, habitual self-mutilator Terry Young leaves his bride at the airport for reasons he can’t understand. Detective Joseph Malloy’s last day on the job turns into an off-the-clock obsession with the subject of a photo his successor finds in one of his open-case files. Contractor Debbie Wendell’s dragon-lady façade shivers and shatters when she finds a handmade wooden box at an airport construction site and learns that several passersby seem to be just as fascinated with it as she is. If these beginnings sound strange, their sequels are even stranger, as Kilgore’s five heroes keep knocking up against apparently omniscient strangers, obscurely motivated killers, fellow travelers who ask them probing questions and vanish and law-enforcement officers who seem determined to lock them up for the offense of looking for Shayla Hacker—for, as her Delphic former neighbor tells Gregory, “Once you’ve seen her eyes, you won’t be able to stop looking for her.” The search takes them as far as Cairo and Rio de Janeiro before coming to rest in Three Rooks, Ind., where a surprising number of impossible questions will be answered and a much larger number will not.
Twin Peaks meets The Da Vinci Code in this surpassingly weird debut.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-932557-36-7
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Bleak House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
This superb series (The Dark Angel, 2018, etc.) never disappoints. Its patented combination of mysterious circumstances,...
An anonymous letter brings DCI Harry Nelson memories of past sorrows and present dangers.
The letter mentions a stone circle that harks back to the 20-year-old case of a missing child. Ten years later, another missing child introduced Harry to archaeologist Ruth Galloway when he asked her to examine some bones. That case began a working relationship that turned out to be equally productive in personal terms: A short-lived affair between the two produced a child, Kate, though Harry is married and has two grown daughters. His wife, Michelle, who accepts Kate in their lives, is about to give birth to a baby who may or may not be Harry’s. A new archaeological team working near the site of the original henge finds a stone coffin containing bones. The head of the dig is Leif Anderssen, whose father, Erik, was Ruth’s mentor all those years ago. As Harry continues to receive cryptic messages, the bones of what Ruth thinks is a young girl are found near the new dig, opening up yet another old case. The police think the body is that of Margaret Lacey, who vanished from a street party in 1981. The focus at the time was on her parents; her older siblings, Annie and Luke; and John Mostyn, a neighbor and odd duck who collected stones. But nothing was ever proven, and Margaret’s body was never found. The birth of George, Michelle’s son, puts more pressure on Harry, who loves his wife and Ruth in different ways, to stay in his marriage. Nelson’s team and some friends of Ruth’s use their own areas of expertise to search for clues from the past, but when the child of Annie’s daughter, Star, is kidnapped, the present-day crisis takes center stage.
This superb series (The Dark Angel, 2018, etc.) never disappoints. Its patented combination of mysterious circumstances, police procedure, and agonizing relationship problems will keep you reading, and feeling, all night.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-97464-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
A treat for aficionados of shopkeeper-sleuth cozies.
Notch another corpse for Jacobia “Jake” Tiptree (Death by Chocolate Malted Milkshake, 2019, etc.).
After slowly working its way out of the red, Jake’s sweet shop is now one of the linchpins of the revitalized business district of Eastport, Maine. But she and her partner, Ellie White, are less than thrilled when Henry Hadlyme, star of the food tourism show Eat This! offers to include The Chocolate Moose on his podcast Eating on the Edge! which highlights off-the-beaten-track purveyors of New England fare. Hadlyme seems a little slimy to Jake and Ellie, and his interest in their treats seems less than sincere. But when he calls Jake “missy,” that’s it; the two chocolateers boot him out of their shop. He comes back with a vengeance—or at least, his corpse does. It turns up in the basement of the Moose with a stuffed parrot pinned to its shoulder and a cutlass jabbed through its chest in a gruesome nod to the ongoing Eastport Pirate Festival. Jake would love to present police chief Bob Arnold with a convenient alternative to charging her with Hadlyme’s murder. And there’s no dearth of suspects: A surreptitious trip to the Eat This! production trailer lets Jake know that pretty much everyone involved with the show hated Hadlyme. But finding out exactly who croaked the curmudgeon—and offering the chief some proof—proves to be a challenge to Jake’s and Ellie’s ingenuity, health, and welfare.
A treat for aficionados of shopkeeper-sleuth cozies.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1134-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
