A consistently exciting debut with complex characters.
In this police procedural, a detective returns to her hometown to solve her sister’s murder and becomes the prime suspect in a serial murder case.
Detective Claire Wolfe returns to her hometown of Newburgh and joins the police department, ostensibly to stay near her aging parents. [8-9] Claire’s true motive concerns her sister Tina's unsolved murder twelve years ago. [6] Millen gives sensitive visual representations of characters; Claire’s mother appears as an “old woman” whose “Gray streaks had invaded her untamed bush of blonde hair like weeds,” and “shifty eyes, her head wobbling.” [59] As young girls matching Tina’s profile (“fourteen years old…blonde hair and blue eyes [and] studied at Newburgh Middle School” [89]) become victims, [81, 126] and the case expands to a serial killer investigation, [87] Claire becomes a suspect because she accessed Tina’s case file on her first day at work [15, 231] and because the killings resumed immediately after she moved back to Newburgh. [233] Millen’s strength lies in her ability to convey information subtly rather than via reportage; readers become participants and receive moments of cathartic release urging them on. When Claire and a potential witness find themselves cornered by a SWAT team and Claire tries to escape in a car, but the SWAT team’s bullets destroy the vehicle, [298] readers must figure out for themselves what happened to the witness. Like Claire, they must take up the mantra, "Look for what's missing." [25] In fact, Claire finds her witness through a common escape technique when the story escapes a writer’s control—the deus ex machina. At the moment Claire decides to commit suicide, her phone rings, and her witness invites her to her home. [275] Yet, when balanced against a holistic assessment of the novel, this improbable circumstance does not register.
A consistently exciting debut with complex characters.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-950139-07-1
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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