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
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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