by J.D. Knight ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2016
A protagonist whose nimbleness while facing danger is something to marvel at—and celebrate.
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An ex-cop has only a week to track down a missing witness who may have an alibi for a death-row inmate in this thriller.
Born-again Muslim Shahid al-Muhamin is a condemned man, seven days away from the gas chamber for killing his eight-months-pregnant wife. His attorney, Andrea Faber, thinks she can save him on appeal if she finds a witness who was absent from Shahid’s trial. She hires Virgil Roy Proctor to locate Harley Flowers, a suspended cop who claims Shahid was selling him rock cocaine at the time of the fatal stabbing eight years ago. Virgil thinks Shahid’s guilty but takes the job, hoping to steer Andrea clear of the convict’s children, Keisha and Jerrell Franklin. He knew the kids’ aunt and may be behind their currently unknown whereabouts. In the midst of a custody battle with his ex-wife, Catherine, Virgil also needs viable income to prove he can support his 7-year-old son. The case isn’t as easy as it sounds: a man representing a mysterious client offers a hefty paycheck to find Keisha and Jerrell, and before long, Virgil realizes Flowers isn’t missing but deliberately hiding. Dealing with unsavory characters in his search doesn’t quite prepare Virgil for stumbling upon a brutal murder—with more than one victim. Virgil, not a bona fide detective, has all the earmarks of one. He moves from one lead (Flowers’ eccentric reverend brother) to the next and borrows money from Shahid’s legal counsel for payoffs. Sure, he may pull the occasional breaking and entering and pocket any cash he comes across, but he’s not without honor, always considering the children, even the two who aren’t his. Relationships are refreshingly atypical, especially one involving Candy Quirke, who avoids her cheating, stalker-ish ex-husband, Dennis, by staying at Virgil’s, taking his phone calls like an assistant. Despite its serious subject matter, the story is often tongue-in-cheek: Virgil can’t keep himself out of jail, but just watch how he gets away from his cellmate, a furious, NFL linebacker–sized man named Dennis. There are solid ties to the preceding Virgil-centric novel (for example, Keisha and Jerrell), but Knight (Zero Tolerance, 2010) caters to both new and returning readers.
A protagonist whose nimbleness while facing danger is something to marvel at—and celebrate.Pub Date: March 3, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 392
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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