A riveting procedural with detectives who are as curious as the suspects they’re investigating.
Police investigate a London university where the faculty includes someone who may resort to murder to keep a secret in this crime-thriller debut.
DI Colin McDermott’s latest case is a woman’s death by London Transport bus. It could have been an accident or suicide, but it’s definitely suspicious. There was no ID near the body, for one, and Metropolitan Police learn she had two names: her real one and what she’d used at St. Gregory’s College. Since she died near the college and during the lunch break, McDermott, DS George Ridley, and DC Wilhemina Quinn question St. Gregory’s faculty. Turns out a few of the suspiciously unhelpful professors have applied for the soon-to-be vacated principalship; detectives surmise the victim, a first-year student, in some way posed a threat to an applicant. One of the faculty members later turns up dead in a probable suicide, but McDermott treats it as a second murder, likely at the hands of a single killer. Shady histories among the teaching staff slowly come to light, from blackmail to spousal abuse. McDermott searches for a link between the two victims and determines who at St. Gregory’s has something to hide—something worth killing for. Napier layers his story with subplots, motives, and suspects, with the narrative examining characters just like the detectives do. Pinpointing the culprit is far from easy, and suspense is aptly retained until the tale’s nearly over. Still, the author manages nuance: the DI remains understandably affected by his wife’s terrorist-bombing death a decade earlier and steps in to help his daughter Megan’s friend Pam, whose parents are apparently ashamed of her lesbianism. The dialogue consists primarily of trading information or speculations, befitting the whodunit format. McDermott, however, is not without sardonic wit, calling an especially shifty individual a “veritable paragon of virtue.” Readers unfamiliar with British slang will find plenty of narrative context (for example, an “argy-bargy” is clearly an argument).
A riveting procedural with detectives who are as curious as the suspects they’re investigating.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 276
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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