The detective work is unspectacular but conscientious, absorbing, and believable, and the unblinking heroine’s clearheaded...
Upstate New York reporter Ellie Stone’s trip to a burning barn takes her outside her comfort zone in more ways than one.
Although Joshua Shaw made a name for himself back in the 1920s breeding and racing thoroughbreds, the Shaw family hasn’t used Tempesta Farm for years, and Ellie’s trip out there to cover a fire in one of the estate’s 40 barns one morning in August 1962 might have proved a waste of time if her poking amid the embers hadn’t disclosed two charred corpses. The victims seem well beyond identification, but the male has been shot, the female strangled, and the fire deliberately set. That’s plenty to interest readers of the New Holland Republic and maybe even publisher Artie Short, who still finds it hard to take a girl reporter seriously. Sheriffs from two different counties take an interest in the case, but it’s Ellie who digs up the leads that eventually identify the victims as Johnny Dornan, a jockey for Louis Fleischman’s Harlequin stables, and Vivian McLaglen, whose ties to Johnny go back a long way through some dark patches. Also missing is Micheline Charbonneau, a lady of the evening whom Lou had hired to entertain Johnny on what turned out to be his last night on Earth. A note Johnny left scrawled in a newspaper left behind in his lodgings—“Robinson S Friday midnight”—promises further illumination and, indeed, turns out to hold the key to the case, but few readers will decipher its import before Ellie. Tested by both her dogged pursuit of a story with deep roots and her relationship with Virginia aristocrat Frederick Carsten Whitcomb III, whose socialite mother turns out to be as anti-Semitic as his blue-blooded buddies, Ellie comes up trumps.
The detective work is unspectacular but conscientious, absorbing, and believable, and the unblinking heroine’s clearheaded first-person narrative is never less than appealing.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63388-419-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Koontz widens his canvas dramatically while dimming the hard brilliance common to his shorter winners:1995’s taut masterpiece, Intensity, and 1998’s moon-drenched midsummer nightmare, Seize the Night. This time the author takes up mind control, wiring his tale into the brainwashing epics The Manchurian Candidate and last spring’s film The Matrix. The laser-beam brightness of his earlier bestsellers fades, however, as he stuffs each scene with draining chitchat and extra plotting that seldom rings with novelty. Martine “Martie” Rhodes, a video-game designer, has developed a rare mental disorder: autophobia, fear of oneself. Meanwhile, her husband Dusty’s young half-brother, Skeet Caulfield, has decided to jump off the roof of a building the two men are repairing—because Skeet has seen the Angel of the next world, who has revealed that things are pretty wonderful there, and he wants to come on over. Martie’s best friend, real-estate agent Susan Jagger, is newly coping with agoraphobia, fear of the outdoors. What’s more, Susan knows she’s being visited and raped at night by her separated husband, Eric, although all her doors and windows are locked. She can’t remember these rapes, but her panties are stained with semen. So when she sets up a camcorder to record her sleeping hours, she gets a huge surprise after viewing the tape. How these mental and physical events have come about—ditto the psychiatric background of the Keanuphobe millionairess who shows up (yes! she fears Keanu Reeves)—has something to do with the ladies’ psychiatrist, Dr. Mark Ahriman, the son of a famous dead movie director whose eyes the doctor keeps in a bottle of formaldehyde and studies, in hopes of siphoning off Dad’s inspiration. Although the whole story could have been told to better effect in 300 pages, Koontz deftly sidesteps clichÇs of expression while nonetheless applying an air pump to the suspense: an MO that keeps his yearly 17-million book sales afloat.
Pub Date: Dec. 28, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10666-X
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Utter non-scents.
Die-hard Yankee candle maker Stella Wright (Murder’s No Votive Confidence, 2018) gets caught up in a trans-Atlantic murder plot.
Stella thoroughly enjoys her trip to Paris even though her mother, perfume expert Millie Wright, who’s scheduled to speak on a panel entitled “The Art of Scent Extractions” at the World Perfumery Conference, gets preempted by a murder. Sadly, once they’re back home in Nantucket, things get even weirder. Stella receives an anonymous note threatening her mom if Stella doesn’t turn over a secret formula hidden in Millie’s bag. Her mom can’t help because she’s in the hospital courtesy of an overenthusiastic attempt by Stella’s cat, Tinker, to befriend her. While trespassing on a suspicious sailboat, Stella meets U.S. Agent Sarah Hill, who warns her that well-known anarchist Rex Laruam plans to disrupt the upcoming Peace Jubilee using a stolen formula he secreted in Millie’s bag after he stabbed the agent guarding it back in Paris. Ignoring the advice of her friend Andy Southerland, a Nantucket cop, to leave detection to the professionals, Stella tries to unmask the elusive Laruam. As she spies on a bevy of unlikely suspects, the plot spirals further and further out of control: There’s a Canadian couple staying at an Airbnb run by Stella’s cousin Chris who whisper sweet but suspicious nothings in the dark, a shovel-wielding schoolmarm, a gang of old geezers who have a collective crush on Millie, a surprise 30th-birthday party planned by Stella’s beau, Peter Bailey, and an even more surprising impromptu airplane ride.
Utter non-scents.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2141-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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