Connolly’s latest Charlie Parker thriller offers a powerful story line that weaves together suspense, mystery and a small touch of the supernatural.
Parker, antihero private investigator, returns for another lap around backwoods Maine, with criminals and the occasional ghostly visitor as uneasy companions. This time Parker gets involved with the case of a missing child, 14-year-old Anna Kore, who disappears from the tiny, isolated town of Pastor’s Bay, leaving behind not a single workable clue. But Charlie hasn’t been called in to help find Anna, although his case dovetails with that of her disappearance. Instead, he’s been hired by an attorney representing a strange and conflicted client who may or may not be involved in the Kore case. Parker, whose own wife and child died and whose latest lover, Rachel, has left and taken their daughter, Sam, along with her, labors under no illusions. He knows the chances of getting Anna back alive are slim to none. But the deeper he gets into the case, the more layers he finds: Everyone from Boston-based mobsters to the FBI want a little piece of this action. Parker is a typical world-weary detective, but he’s made more interesting by the company he keeps: Angel and Louis, strangely mismatched souls who are there when Charlie needs them, cops who neither trust nor respect him and sometimes the odd visitor from a world beyond the living. An intelligent, plausible thriller, both harrowing and memorable.
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6527-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
This one will appeal to Dan Brown fans and anyone else in the mood for a page-turning yarn.
Religion and murder meet in Malta and Rome in this 14th entry in the author’s Cotton Malone series (The Bishop’s Pawn, 2018, etc.).
The pope has died, and His Eminence Kastor Cardinal Gallo schemes to get the job. Unfortunately, he is “radioactive” in the church, even “proclaimed a threat to all the faithful.” Oh, and he only fakes his religious belief. All he wants is power, and he will kill for it. His identical twin brother, Pollux, is a Knight of Malta but not a priest and certainly not his brother’s keeper. Meanwhile, series hero Cotton Malone is on a special freelance assignment from Britain’s MI6, looking for rumored secret correspondence between Churchill and Mussolini. And former Army Ranger Luke Daniels trails Kastor, who is from Malta, where much of the story takes place. Cotton finds a mysterious ring engraved with a Maltese cross and a five-word palindrome that’s spelled out a tad too often. Perhaps a secret lies in the engraved words. He also uncovers documents hidden by Mussolini and looks for what’s hidden in an obelisk in Rome. The intrigue is intense as Kastor and a few goons will stoop to murder to abet his rise to the most powerful post in the Catholic Church. Thriller fans will have their violence fix, but the real fun is in learning about the inner workings of the church, its history dating all the way back to Constantine, and the troubled past of Malta. Cynicism about Christianity abounds; why else would Simon Wiesenthal have said that the Vatican has the best spy service in the world? Popes Pius XI and XII never stood up to the fascists, and perhaps heaven, hell, and the Holy Trinity were invented in the third century merely to differentiate Christianity from Judaism. Cotton is highly capable—“Failure was not his style,” meaning he fits in well among the can-do American heroes in the genre. But Kastor and Pollux are the conniving hypocrites who really pop off the pages.
This one will appeal to Dan Brown fans and anyone else in the mood for a page-turning yarn.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-14026-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
A page-turner that doesn’t quite stick the landing.
A fresh start for a doctor and her family becomes a living nightmare in Kubica’s (When the Lights Go Out, 2018, etc.) new psychological thriller.
Human ecology professor Will Foust and his wife, Sadie, a doctor, have two boys, 14-year-old Otto and 7-year-old Tate. On the outside, they look like the perfect family. After Will’s sister, Alice, dies from an apparent suicide, Sadie hopes that she and Will can provide stability for Alice’s 16-year-old daughter, Imogen. They’ve also decided to leave Chicago and move into Alice’s home on a small island off the coast of Maine, which Will has inherited. Unfortunately, Sadie, who used to practice emergency medicine, finds no satisfaction in her work at a local clinic; Otto is starting to show signs of the problems Sadie hoped he’d left behind; and though she understands that Imogen is devastated in the wake of her mother’s death, the girl is behaving in a downright alarming way, including gleefully showing Sadie a picture she took of her mother as she hung from the attic rafters. Sadie also thinks Will might be cheating on her. Again. The family tension stretches to a breaking point when a neighbor woman (whom Sadie thinks Will has been cozying up to) is stabbed to death. It’s not long before Sadie finds herself at the center of a murder investigation. Kubica ably molds Sadie into a (very) complicated woman with simmering secrets; as usual, she is a master of atmospherics who can turn almost any location into a swirling cesspool of creepy possibility. However, in a story told from multiple perspectives—first person and otherwise—a few are less compelling than others, such as that of over-the-top Camille, who claims to be having an affair with Will. And while Kubica sprinkles in a few clues about the big twist, she still asks readers to suspend disbelief to the breaking point.
A page-turner that doesn’t quite stick the landing.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7783-6911-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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