A fulfilling mystery with impressive plot intricacies.
In La Barre’s (Stranger in Vienna, 1995) latest novel, a young girl becomes entwined in secrets that resurface upon a young woman’s return to a small town.
Young Melinda MacDougall befriends Wilhelmina Kingsley, the old woman who lives in the grand house across the street. She spends afternoons listening to Ms. Kingsley talk of Isabel Benoit Lockwood, her orphaned niece. Isabel, raised by Wilhelmina, was once married to Forrest Lockwood, the son of powerful and scrupulous Owen Lockwood, owner of Lockwood Machine in Dexter, Mass. The loss of her firstborn son and husband drove Isabel to Rome to mend, while others blamed her for Forrest’s presumed suicide and the tragic death of baby Sam. Upon Wilhelmina’s death, Isabel returns with her cross-eyed adopted Italian son, Carlo, to claim her inheritance—the Kingsley estate. Melinda, who takes expensive piano lessons from Isabel and plays with Carlo, is captivated by the woman; she unknowingly ends up tangled in Isabel’s money troubles and her web of men. Among these compelling, well-developed characters are Mr. Farinelli, an Italian-American involved in real estate, who loves Isabel and tries to protect her; Mr. Zanotti, a sinister Italian man whose true connection to Isabel and Carlo is a mystery; and former father-in-law Owen, who hopes to unearth a secret that will get rid of Isabel once and for all, despite his unsavory sexual feelings for her. La Barre does well by providing backstory through Wilhelmina’s account before moving on to Melinda’s experiences with Isabel and Carlo. The lack of chapter breaks speeds the story along, adding to the gripping nature of this thriller. The characters are multifaceted, yet their motivations are never cut and dried. La Barre’s use of foreshadowing is subtle enough to build suspense, keeping the twists and turns of the plot believable but unexpected.
A fulfilling mystery with impressive plot intricacies.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-1466301634
Page Count: 190
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The story is sadly familiar, the treatment claustrophobically intense.
Twenty years after Chloe Davis’ father was convicted of killing half a dozen young women, someone seems to be celebrating the anniversary by extending the list.
No one in little Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, was left untouched by Richard Davis’ confession, least of all his family members. His wife, Mona, tried to kill herself and has been incapacitated ever since. His son, Cooper, became so suspicious that even now it’s hard for him to accept pharmaceutical salesman Daniel Briggs, whose sister, Sophie, also vanished 20 years ago, as Chloe’s fiance. And Chloe’s own nightmares, which lead her to rebuff New York Times reporter Aaron Jansen, who wants to interview her for an anniversary story, are redoubled when her newest psychiatric patient, Lacey Deckler, follows the path of high school student Aubrey Gravino by disappearing and then turning up dead. The good news is that Dick Davis, whom Chloe has had no contact with ever since he was imprisoned after his confession, obviously didn’t commit these new crimes. The bad news is that someone else did, someone who knows a great deal about the earlier cases, someone who could be very close to Chloe indeed. First-timer Willingham laces her first-person narrative with a stifling sense of victimhood that extends even to the survivors and a series of climactic revelations, at least some of which are guaranteed to surprise the most hard-bitten readers.
The story is sadly familiar, the treatment claustrophobically intense.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-2508-0382-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
