A tense and involving tale of a young woman seeking revenge and finding a family.
A young woman hunting her mother’s killer discovers revelations about her relatives.
As Danbury’s novel opens, teenager Rose LaFlamme is being dropped off at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere by the callous, brutal man who impregnated her (she eventually comes to dub him “the Pirate”) and is now handing her some money to travel to the nearest abortion clinic. She eventually arrives at the unwelcoming facility (“Planned Parenthood…the name Infanticide Incorporated must not have tested well with focus groups”), endures the procedure, and then shortly afterward gives birth to the aborted fetus’ undetected twin sister. Rose keeps the baby, steals the Pirate’s money, and hopes to stay hidden from him as she raises her daughter. This scenario only lasts a few years before he tracks her down and murders her—setting her daughter, Phoenix, on a lifelong mission to find the man who killed her mother and make him pay. Along the way, she encounters her grandfather Liam McGinn and his friend Curt Martinsen and begins developing complicated relationships with both. She changes her name to Phoebe in order to protect her from evil people who might be looking for her—particularly the Pirate, whose fate seems entwined with hers even as the years pass. She grows older, establishes a life of her own, marries, and has a baby, but that generational danger is always lurking in the shadows.
This tense, gritty background plot runs throughout the book and is obviously destined for a resolution at the tale’s climax. It therefore sits awkwardly alongside the bulk of the novel’s main story of young Phoebe traveling the American Southwest in the age of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; learning the ways of the new “World Wide Web”; having humorous misadventures with her pets; and getting to know Curt and her grandfather. These plot threads are rendered with warmth and excellent pacing. Phoebe’s character is remarkably fleshed out—she and Curt are the tale’s best-realized creations, although Danbury can sometimes allow the narrative to lapse into bathos (“I’m a little sensitive at the moment,” Phoebe says at one point, “and I’m feeling a tidal wave of emotions right now”). The increasingly and refreshingly complex personal story that develops between Phoebe and her own child and the newfound family in her life exists a bit uncomfortably next to the standard thriller element of a character as thoroughly evil as the Pirate (he kills his drug supplier; he accelerates his car to squash an armadillo; he has near-supernatural, Javert-like persistence). Fortunately, the jarring tone is not fatal to the tale since the author is a skillful writer with a sure-footed knack for keeping the narrative moving. A significant element of this is Danbury’s decision to delve in detail into the individual backstories of his characters, ranging from Phoebe’s grandfather to the Pirate himself. These extended flashback sequences provide a welcome shading to Phoebe’s own tale as it progresses, and they further highlight the author’s ability to craft moving, believable characters. Liam’s story, in particular, the tale of a good man hitting rock bottom and finding his way back to the world, works as an effective narrative counterpoint to the book’s main plot threads.
A tense and involving tale of a young woman seeking revenge and finding a family.Pub Date: July 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73334-402-9
Page Count: 346
Publisher: JEFE PRESS
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
© 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.
