The flashbacks, dirty family secrets and sudden plot twists harken back to McMahon’s debut (Promise Not to Tell, 2007), but,...
Small-town copycat crimes yet again spur a hometown girl to recall more personal situations in McMahon’s well-crafted—if formulaic—sophomore effort.
As Rhonda Farr waits at a gas station in her rural Vermont town, she witnesses the unthinkable: Someone dressed in a rabbit suit snatches a small child from a car and drives away. Rhonda is guilt-ridden and joins the rescue efforts for Ernestine, but she is not alone—station owner Pat and her nephew Warren seem equally committed to the cause. For Rhonda, the crime hits close to home—the rabbit’s getaway car belonged to the mother-in-law of her longtime unrequited love, Peter Shale. All signs point to him as a suspect, but it’s hard for Rhonda to accept that he is guilty, especially because Peter has a daughter the same age as Ernestine. Rhonda and Warren become a team, linking up to scout for clues and eventually beginning a romantic relationship. But the hunt also forces her to confront a pivotal summer in her own childhood, when Peter’s father vanished, and his sister, Lizzy, Rhonda’s best friend, went crazy. Lizzy also disappeared a few years later, leaving everyone to assume that she was with her father, making both of them suspects now too—especially when Peter and a woman looking remarkably like Lizzy are spotted at a local hotel with a girl Ernestine’s age. Rhonda’s memories uncover a trove of intricate family secrets about the Farrs and the Shales, including illicit romances, questionable paternity of various children and even signs of abuse. But just when Rhonda thinks she has it all figured out, new suspects emerge, a body is discovered and the case grows more complicated.
The flashbacks, dirty family secrets and sudden plot twists harken back to McMahon’s debut (Promise Not to Tell, 2007), but, commendably, she still manages some surprises.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-144588-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
A tantalizing, un-put-down-able novel by an instant master of the form.
In a debut novel by the creator of the television show The Killing, a serial killer in Copenhagen targets young mothers as part of a complex scheme that seems to have ties to the apparent murder of government minister Rosa Hartung's 12-year-old daughter, Kristine, a year ago.
The homicidal Chestnut Man, named after the chestnut and matchstick dolls he leaves behind, is a grisly operator who amputates the hands of the women he abducts while they're still alive. A pair of mismatched investigators are reluctantly on the case: Naia Thulin, a local cop who, tired of what she thinks of as "tedious" assignments with Major Crimes, eyes a promotion to the cybercrime unit, and Mark Hess, a disheveled Europol agent on temporary leave from the Hague to serve "penance for some blunder or other." The big complicating factor is the absence of proof that Kristine, who disappeared, is dead; when her fingerprints turn up on the chestnut dolls, hopes stir that she is, in fact, alive. It takes a little time for the novel to set itself apart from other such thrillers. What are the chestnut dolls if not an imitation of the diabolical snowmen in Jo Nesbø's The Snowman? But with its densely layered plot, chilling settings, and multiple suspects with murderous grudges, Sveistrup's epic rises above any such comparisons. This is a page-turner that will make you hesitate before turning the page, so unnerving is the violence. One of the best and scariest crime novels of the year, it adds to its rewards by promising us at least one sequel.
A tantalizing, un-put-down-able novel by an instant master of the form.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-289536-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
The closest thing to an actual hell ride you'll ever experience (one hopes). Thrilling, bloody, and ferocious.
A death-defying Bolivian adventure in the primordial forest...starring a homeless teenager from Boston who just might be a shaman.
Sleeping late isn't an option in the jungle. By the time the sun is up, it's "already ricocheting with the calls of monkeys, parrots, frogs, all going at it molto vivace, shrieking and squawking as if the world were waking up in pain, the jungle giving birth to itself each morning." The setting of Ferencik's (The River at Night, 2017) second female-driven adventure thriller is hair-raisingly vivid, replete with tarantulas, piranhas, jaguars, and electric eels. We experience them all through the eyes of Lily Bushwold, 19, "a half-starved, high strung wild child who lived out of a backpack, homeless since [she] was thirteen." Lily thought she had landed a dream job in South America but arrived to find herself the victim of a scam; she's living on shoplifted bananas in Cochabamba when she meets Omar, a handsome hunter from a remote jungle village who has come to try his luck in the big city. He and Lily have already fallen in love when he learns that his 4-year-old nephew back home has been eaten by a jaguar; when he returns to seek revenge, Lily goes with him. What does she have to lose, right? She finds out pretty quickly during the most terrifying plane flight in recent literary history. After a near crash and a water landing, it's welcome to Ayachero—Omar's jungle home, where everybody except one little cross-eyed boy immediately hates the gringa. "A burnt-meat smell, the reek of stale water, and a stray sweet whiff of pig dung merged with a humid, breathless heat." Among the unwelcoming locals are two missionaries named Harriet and a female shaman named Beya, an outcast from a rival tribe who lives in the woods nearby. When Beya is able to save Lily from death by coaching her telepathically through an electric eel encounter, her next question is, "Are you the only shaman in Boston?" Even with the telepathy, Lily's experience feels almost real—then, in the final chapters, takes a wild turn into superhero territory.
The closest thing to an actual hell ride you'll ever experience (one hopes). Thrilling, bloody, and ferocious.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6892-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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