Lodge's choices celebrate the complexity of humanity and elevate this police procedural.
A man reports the murder of his girlfriend, which happened while he was Skyping with her, in Lodge’s (She Lies in Wait, 2019) second English mystery.
At first the police don't take the report seriously because the caller won't give his name, but on a hunch, DCI Jonah Sheens and his team look into it, and they do indeed find the body of Zoe Swardadine. From the start, there is a plethora of shady characters doing shady things to hide their shady secrets. Foremost among them is Aidan, the (married) boyfriend who called in the crime. The drama of his on-again, off-again relationship with Zoe may have been responsible for her complete transformation over the last few months of her life. And then there’s Victor, Zoe’s irascible co-worker, who may have nursed his own fantasies of a relationship with her, and Maeve and Angeline, Zoe’s best friends, who relied on her to pick them up every time they fell. As a picture of Zoe’s last few months begins to coalesce, Jonah and his team sense a malevolent presence at the heart of the case—someone who hated Zoe enough to murder her at her most vulnerable time. They rush to put the pieces together before one of their own is unwittingly put in danger. Lodge alternates between chapters following the investigation into Zoe’s death and chapters that recount the final 20 months of her life, allowing the reader to understand Zoe as a fully rounded and complicated character, not just a victim. This choice, trendy in thrillers but almost always effective when the characters are strong, consistently reminds us to look beyond simplistic binaries of victim and perpetrator, innocent and guilty, and recognize that all humans make problematic choices, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for bad.
Lodge's choices celebrate the complexity of humanity and elevate this police procedural.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984818-07-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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