An intriguing and altogether enchanting mystery.
Armstrong’s debut, set in 1922 in the Cornish countryside, channels The Hound of the Baskervilles as her heroine wonders if a curse is actually to blame for a real-life murder.
Ruby Vaughn, who works for a seller of old and rare books in Exeter, walks into a scandal when she goes to a village called Lothlel Green to deliver a box of books to Ruan Kivell, who's known to the locals as the Pellar. As far as Ruby can tell, that means he's “more or less some type of arcane Cornish exorcist....[A] cross between a physician, a witch, and a priest,” but that’s not to say she isn't intrigued. Ruan is a mystery within a mystery; the second time Ruby meets him, she thinks: “This wasn’t the charming man I’d seen only yesterday...No. He had thunder on his face, and there was something different about him. Something untamed, uncivilized, and entirely terrifying.” While in Lothlel Green, Ruby reunites with Tamsyn, her old love, who's been living there in Penryth Hall since she married Sir Edward Chenowyth and had a son. When Edward dies mysteriously and Ruby is nearly killed herself, she learns about the Curse of Penryth Hall, where the Chenowyth family lives. Years ago, a jilted woman foolishly asked a local witch for help winning back the heart of her lover, a Chenowyth ancestor who'd married a barmaid, and “the witch set a curse upon the Chenowyth line vowing revenge. She killed the faithless heir and his young bride, removing his inconstant heart and delivering it to his betrothed in a silver box.” Ruby is not sure she believes in curses, but she knows that Edward was not a faithful husband and likely has many enemies. Tamsyn isn’t too broken up about Edward’s death, but she’ll do anything to protect her son from becoming the next victim of the curse, and she needs Ruby’s help. Romance and danger lurk in every corner of this spooky estate. The folklore in the story is charming, and the characters treat it with reverence even while searching for a human killer.
An intriguing and altogether enchanting mystery.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781250886019
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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