More of Bannalec’s winning formula: a healthy chunk of Brittany with a bracing dash of murder.
From the oyster farms of Port Belon, Commissaire Georges Dupin (The Missing Corpse, 2019, etc.) pushes north to probe the mysterious deaths of two women near the bay of Douarnenez.
Douarnenez is a fishing town where small family-owned boats jockey with large trawlers, all competing to wrest a living from the unpredictable Atlantic. Céline Kerkrom was a line fisher, one of the few women to own her own boat. She lived alone and kept to herself. So why would someone slit her throat and dump her body in a container of fish guts in the harbor’s auction hall? Harbormistress Gaétane Gochat is appalled, not so much by the violence of the murder as by the disruption it causes to the fish hall. Dupin, on the other hand, doesn’t mind rattling a few cages along the way to finding Céline’s murderer. He confronts Charles Morin, owner of a large fleet of deep-sea trawlers as well as some coastal boats, who’s rumored to take in more than the legal limit. He also chases down a local character known as Captain Vaillant, who’s reputed to be a pirate. But more murders lead Dupin and inspectors Riwal and Kadeg to wonder if the origin of the crime really is local, since the second victim, Laetitia Darot, was an outsider, a researcher who studied the dolphins in the Parc Iroise. As usual, Dupin’s drive to catch the killer quickly is balanced by his desire to enjoy the local cafes and the breathtaking Breton coast just a little bit longer. And as usual, justice triumphs.
More of Bannalec’s winning formula: a healthy chunk of Brittany with a bracing dash of murder.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-17338-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Reading anything by Slaughter is like riding a particularly scary amusement park ride. Reading this one is like booking a...
A plain-Jane daughter’s 31st birthday celebration explodes into a nightmare within a nightmare in Slaughter’s latest stand-alone.
Andrea Oliver’s always felt inferior to her parents. Her father, Gordon Oliver, is a trusts and estates attorney; her mother, Dr. Laura Oliver, is a speech therapist. Andy herself has never aspired to any career goal higher than serving as an assistant to someone important. Even when she left Belle Isle, Georgia, for the Big Apple, she got nowhere, and she was only too eager to return home when her mother announced three years ago that she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer. As the two women mark Andy’s birthday by sharing lunch in a mall cafe, a crazed shooter opens fire on a mother-and-daughter pair who’ve stopped to greet Laura, and Andy’s life changes in an instant. Or rather two instants, the first when the shots ring out and the second when Laura, after inviting the killer to shoot her next, coolly and dispassionately dispatches him. It takes the dazed Andy hours to realize that her mother’s not at all who she seems to be, and by the time she’s ready to accept the fact that Laura Oliver is a woman with a past, that past is already racing to catch up with both mother and daughter. Cutting back and forth between Andy’s harrowing flight to nowhere after Laura pushes her out of her home and a backstory 30 years earlier involving the Army of the Changing World, a cell of amateur terrorists determined to strike a mortal blow against greedy capitalists and, it eventually turns out, each other as well, Slaughter (The Good Daughter, 2017, etc.) never abates her trademark intensity, and fans will feel that the story is pumping adrenalin directly into their bloodstreams. Long before the end, though, the impostures, secret identities, hidden motives, and double-crosses will have piled up past the point of no return, leaving the tale to run on adrenalin alone.
Reading anything by Slaughter is like riding a particularly scary amusement park ride. Reading this one is like booking a season ticket on a ride that never lets you off.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-243027-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK TO SCREEN
Gundar-Goshen’s U.S. debut seems poised to catch fire, with the multiple narrative perspectives and dizzying reversals that...
In this intense moral thriller, an Israeli doctor conceals a fatal hit-and-run, is blackmailed by his victim’s widow into operating an underground clinic for refugees, and sees everything he ever believed about himself crumble to bits.
Neurosurgeon Eitan Green has just gotten out from a very late night at the ER. He is burning off steam on a deserted road in his SUV, bellowing along with Janis Joplin, “thinking that the moon was the most beautiful he had ever seen when he hit[s] the man.” From the moment we meet him, Eitan’s bad luck will become tangled in his good intentions, his poor choices with his righteous ones, his appeal with his weakness. The very vehicle in which he had the accident was a consolation prize to make up for having to move from Tel Aviv to dusty Beersheba: he was transferred when he uncovered corruption at his hospital. So he’s quite an ethical guy, as murderers go, and a devoted husband and father, too. Further complicating the situation and spinning off additional consequences, his wife is the police detective assigned to investigate the hit-and-run accident. By then Eitan has already learned that his getaway was not as clean as he had hoped: the day after the accident, a beautiful Eritrean woman shows up at his door with his wallet, dropped at the scene—and a demand. “During the day, you can do whatever you want…but you will keep your nights free.” Free to provide medical care to an endless stream of illegal immigrants whom he will treat in secret in a garage. That is just the first of the twists upon twists upon twists in this story—more than one of which will have readers yelping out loud.
Gundar-Goshen’s U.S. debut seems poised to catch fire, with the multiple narrative perspectives and dizzying reversals that connoisseurs of this genre adore.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-39543-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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