by Howard Owen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 31, 2015
Owen has a solid grip on people and place and the social and racial tensions buzzing through a city haunted by history—a...
Willie Mays Black, reporter/drinker/police gadfly, searches for a serial killer in Owen’s (Parker Field, 2014, etc.) fourth crime caper.
Young women, each corpse marked with a distinctive tattoo, have been discovered in Richmond, Virginia. Ronnie Sax, one-time photojournalist, full-time pornographer, possessed all the right perversions, and the cops jailed him. Even Willie thinks he’s guilty until he begins getting threats that his single, pregnant, bartending, college-age daughter, Andi, will be targeted unless Sax is released. Sax’s sister provides an alibi, and he’s freed. Willie’s suspicions turn to an ex-pol he exposed for bedding an underage girl. Now lobbying to desecrate a slave burial ground with big box stores, that fellow, Wat Chenault, is "fronting for a bunch of bright-eyed hustlers who claim they’ll grow the tax base." Owen drops deft characterizations page upon page: Willie as "a busybody who loves getting paid to snoop," and the true killer as "something out of the latest chainsaw movie." Clean and clear, not an extraneous word or scene, Owen’s plot flashes along like a tense edition of Law & Order: SVU. A former reporter, Owen enjoys knifing the newspapers business's bean counters, eager to ignore breaking news in pursuit of the bottom line. A little black comedy provides the knife twist when a former publisher makes the obits after an unfortunate meeting of Segway and city bus. Owen incorporates regulars like Willie’s mother, the dope-smoking Peggy; Awesome Dude, Peggy’s part-time lodger and part-time street wanderer; and Sarah, a young female reporter Willie fears may give up the news beat to chase a bigger paycheck.
Owen has a solid grip on people and place and the social and racial tensions buzzing through a city haunted by history—a perfect milieu for nuanced crime capers.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-57962-392-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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