A detective investigating a series of deaths in the local Amish community finds that her personal ties to the community both help and hinder her work.
During the year since her first case involving Lancaster’s large Amish community—the murder of an Amish teen (Kingdom Come, 2016)—Detective Elizabeth Harris has settled into small-town life—not something she ever pictured herself doing back when she was a New York cop a lifetime ago. Now she even has a steady relationship with a former Amish man, Ezra Beiler. Because she remains close to the Yoders, the Amish family she helped last year, Elizabeth is the first law enforcement officer to pick up rumblings about mysterious deaths in the community caused by what appears to be a virulent strain of the flu. She also hears the rumor that these deaths have been caused by a hexerei, a curse placed on the families by a brauche man, a folk magic practitioner. Word is that former Amish Henry Stoltzfus is seeking revenge on the community for making him choose between his daughter and his way of life. Elizabeth isn’t sure that Henry and a hexerei have anything to do with the deaths and even doubts that the deaths and illness are the flu after all. Working with Dr. Glen Turner of the Centers for Disease Control, she begins to unravel a mystery that leads to the raw milk the Amish have been giving their families. Though Elizabeth tries to stay focused on the case as the death toll mounts, the attention from Glen begins to distract her, especially as Ezra has become strangely distant. She must tread carefully in both her personal life and her work if she wants to learn the truth.
Surprisingly engrossing, with a pace that effectively builds suspense concerning both the mystery and the heroine’s personal problems. Jensen once again spins a seemingly fanciful topic into a solid reading pleasure.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-425-28290-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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After a hit-and-run kills a high school student, the court of public opinion convicts a lonely outcast.
When Jackie Reed hears her 17-year-old son, Wade, sneaking out the night before the SATs, she knows she should stop him; instead, she pops a Xanax and returns to bed. At 4 a.m., Jackie’s 13-year-old, Connor, wakes to find a rain-soaked Wade hiding something in his closet; he considers tattling but promises to keep quiet. These seemingly innocuous decisions come back to haunt Jackie and Connor the next morning. While Officer Pearl Maze was working the graveyard shift at the Havenkill, New York, police department, Amy Nathanson burst through the door claiming to have been carjacked. According to Amy, her screams summoned 17-year-old Liam Miller, whom the thief ran over during his escape. The cops canvass the neighborhood for witnesses, and the Reeds are stunned to realize that Wade matches the suspect’s description. Evidence mounts against him, and the community ostracizes his family, but still Wade refuses to divulge his whereabouts at the time of the accident. The book opens with Wade’s suicide note, then flashes back five days and unfolds from the perspectives of Jackie, Connor, Pearl, and Amy. This narrative shift maximizes suspense by forcing readers to guess at Wade’s thoughts and actions, allowing Gaylin to insightfully explore the crime’s ripple effects.
This anxiety-fueled stand-alone from Edgar nominee Gaylin (What Remains of Me, 2016, etc.) takes the gulf that naturally develops between teenagers and their families and stocks it with sharks.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-264111-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER
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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. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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