Piercingly effective and genuinely terrifying.
A savage debut thriller that renders the Electra complex electric, the mother/daughter bond a psychopathic stranglehold.
Camille Preaker is a cutter. At 13, she carved “queasy” above her navel, at 29, “vanish” on her neck. In the intervening years, she etched her entire epidermis from the chin down with cries for help. Entertainment Weekly TV critic Flynn discloses this information 60 pages into her explosive novel; before that, we know Camille as a hard-drinking, good-looking Jimmy Breslin wannabe, sent by a second-tier paper to cover two gruesome killings in her Missouri hometown. Nine-year-old Natalie’s corpse was found jammed between the Cut-n-Curl Beauty Parlor and Bifty’s Hardware nine months after another’s girl’s body was dumped in a creek. The murderer’s grisly signature? Both strangled corpses had their teeth yanked out. As she snoops around, Camille gets hot for a cute detective and anxious in her mother’s house. Haunted by the ghost of her sister, a child felled by mysterious illness, Camille warily befriends half-sister Amma, a snaky Lolita with precociously developed smarts and breasts. Bite-sized Queen of Mean who rules the town’s teens, Amma joins Camille in shuddering at their mother, Aurora, an oh-so-proper virago who pulls down a million dollars a year running a pig slaughterhouse. Mommie Dearest is afflicted with an outré psychological disturbance: She inflicts illness on her loved ones to then prove her sweetness by nursing them. Could she be the slayer? Or perhaps an even more hideous revelation awaits? Flynn delivers a great whodunit, replete with hinting details, telling dialogue, dissembling clues. Better yet, she offers appalling, heartbreaking insight into the darkness of her women’s lives: the Stepford polish of desperate housewives, the backstabbing viciousness of drug-gobbling, sex-for-favors Mean Girls, the simmering rage bound to boil over.
Piercingly effective and genuinely terrifying.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-34154-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A mind-bending mystery, an insightful exploration of parent-child relationships, and a cautionary tale about bitterness and...
A young man seeking catharsis probes old wounds and unleashes fresh pain in this expertly crafted stand-alone from Edgar finalist Gaylin (If I Die Tonight, 2018, etc.).
Quentin Garrison is an accomplished true-crime podcaster, but it’s not until his troubled mother, Kate, fatally overdoses that he tackles the case that destroyed his family. In 1976, teenagers Gabriel LeRoy and April Cooper murdered 12 people in Southern California—Kate’s little sister included—before dying in a fire. Kate’s mother committed suicide, and her father withdrew, neglecting Kate, who in turn neglected Quentin. Quentin intends for Closure to examine the killings’ ripple effects, but after an interview with his estranged grandfather ends in a fight, he resolves to find a different angle. When a source alleges that April is alive and living in New York as Renee Bloom, Quentin is dubious, but efforts to debunk the claim only uncover more supporting evidence, so he flies east to investigate. Renee’s daughter, online film columnist Robin Diamond, is preoccupied with Twitter trolls and marital strife when Quentin calls to inquire about her mom’s connection to April Cooper. Robin initially dismisses Quentin but, upon reflection, realizes she knows nothing of Renee’s past. Before she can ask, a violent home invasion hospitalizes her parents and leaves Robin wondering whom she can trust. Artfully strewn red herrings and a kaleidoscopic narrative heighten tension while sowing seeds of distrust concerning the characters’ honesty and intentions. Letters from April to her future daughter written mid–crime spree punctuate chapters from Quentin's and Robin’s perspectives, humanizing her and Gabriel in contrast with sensationalized accounts from Hollywood and the media.
A mind-bending mystery, an insightful exploration of parent-child relationships, and a cautionary tale about bitterness and blame.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-284454-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More perhaps than any of Connelly’s much-honored other titles, this one reveals why his procedurals are the most soulful in...
The 30th novel by the creator of Harry Bosch (The Wrong Side of Goodbye, 2016, etc.) and the Lincoln Lawyer (The Gods of Guilt, 2013, etc.) introduces an LAPD detective fighting doggedly for justice for herself and a wide array of victims.
Ever since her partner, Detective Ken Chastain, failed to back up her sexual harassment claim against Lt. Robert Olivas, her supervisor at the Robbery Homicide Division, Renée Ballard has been banished to the midnight shift—the late show. She’s kept her chin down and worked her cases, most of which are routinely passed on to the day shifts, without complaints or recriminations. But that all ends the night she and Detective John Jenkins, the partner who’s running on empty, are called to The Dancers, a nightclub where five people have been shot dead. Three of them—a bookie, a drug dealer, and a rumored mob enforcer—are no great loss, but Ballard can’t forget Cynthia Haddel, the young woman serving drinks while she waited for her acting career to take off. The case naturally falls to Olivas, who humiliatingly shunts Ballard aside. But she persists in following leads during her time off even though she’d already caught another case earlier the same night, the brutal assault on Ramona Ramone, ne Ramón Gutierrez, a trans hooker beaten nearly to death who mumbles something about “the upside-down house” before lapsing into a coma. Despite, or because of, the flak she gets from across the LAPD, Ballard soldiers on, horrified but energized when Chastain is gunned down only a few hours after she tells him off for the way he let her down two years ago. She’ll run into layers of interference, get kidnapped herself, expose a leak in the department, kill a man, and find some wholly unexpected allies before she claps the cuffs on the killer in a richly satisfying conclusion.
More perhaps than any of Connelly’s much-honored other titles, this one reveals why his procedurals are the most soulful in the business: because he finds the soul in the smallest details, faithfully executed.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-22598-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
© 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.
