So, not your usual thriller. And the payoff comes singing like eelgrass in a stream.
Fourth in the Charlie Parker private-eye series (The Killing Kind, 2002, etc.) by former Dublin journalist Connolly: as ambitiously rich as ever, with lyrically dark watercolors.
The explosive plot, with no shortage of violence or death, takes a deeper cut than most thrillers and gathers moral weight as it moves at its own sweet pace, a pace some will find engaging and others windy. Charlie Parker has left his job as an NYPD detective and relocated in Maine, where he still mourns the death of his wife and daughter (Every Dead Thing, 1999) while living with criminal psychologist Rachel Wolfe, the lover who carries his child. The multiplot includes—from the earlier novel—the disappearance of the Aristook Baptists colony of fundamentalists led by the dastardly Rev. Aaron Faulkner, with Parker’s old cohorts Louis and Angel bringing bloody vengeance to bear on racist evildoers never brought to justice, these also woven into the disappearance of young Cassie Blythe, while in South Carolina Parker becomes involved in the possibly wrongful imprisonment and forthcoming trial of Atys Jones, a 19-year-old black man accused of murdering his rich white girlfriend, Marianne Larousse, by beating her with a rock. Then there’s this mysterious old black Cadillac Coup de Ville that keeps showing up, its door opening in the moonlight as if for a ghost to get in, while down in South Carolina Parker’s lawyer friend, Elliot Norton, who is defending Atys, survives a firebombing. When Faulkner calls Parker to his prison cell, the spooky reverend threatens to kill Rachel unless Parker refuses to testify at his trial. And there’s the racist torturer Kitten, who literally is not human and shimmers in the sun. And the dead Cassie, who visits Parker in the night from the astral darkness where she lies.
So, not your usual thriller. And the payoff comes singing like eelgrass in a stream.Pub Date: March 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-5638-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
Most readers will be ahead of the twin investigators in identifying the guilty party. But the mystery is authentic, the...
Peerless networker Patterson (Woman of God, 2016, etc.), who’s become as ubiquitous as Betty Crocker, latches on to a co-author who ups his game in several welcome ways.
Called to a crime scene, Detective Patti Harney of the Chicago PD finds her twin brother, Detective Billy Harney, shot and left for dead in the bedroom of assistant state’s attorney Amy Lentini’s condo. Amy is also present and even more dead. So is Billy’s partner, Detective Katherine Fenton. Working backward and forward from this opening tableau, the authors ask who shot whom and why. The answers are clearly rooted in a warrantless raid Billy led into an apartment building he’d become certain was operating as a sex club catering to Chicago’s finest, including the archbishop and the mayor—even though, as cautious percentage player Lt. Paul Wizniewski warned him, Billy was Homicide, not Vice. The blowback from the raid is predictably intense, entangling Billy, Kate Fenton, and Amy Lentini, who overcomes her initial animosity toward Billy sufficiently to take him to bed. The central mystery is the question of what’s become of the little black book in which Amy is certain Ramona Dillavou, the manager of the sex club, recorded the names and particulars of all her celebrity clients. She’s convinced that some bad cop pounced on it and spirited it away. But which bad cop? Billy, surviving the shooting that left his partner and his lover dead only to find himself accused of murder on the strength of forensic evidence, is helpless to defend himself because he’s lost all memory of what happened in that bedroom. Will he recover it in time to save himself and finger the perp?
Most readers will be ahead of the twin investigators in identifying the guilty party. But the mystery is authentic, the lead-up genuinely suspenseful, and the leading characters and situations more memorable than Patterson’s managed in quite a while. Co-author Ellis is definitely a keeper.Pub Date: March 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-27388-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Sly, unsettling, and impossible to put down.
Land asks if we are doomed to repeat the sins of our fathers—or, in this case, mothers—in her assured, creepy debut.
Fifteen-year-old Annie has a new home in London—and a new name, Milly—now that she's turned her mother in to the police. Psychologist Mike Newmont, his troubled wife, Saskia, and their daughter, Phoebe, have taken Milly in until her mother’s trial begins in 12 weeks. Only Mike and a few others know who Milly really is: the daughter of a nurse who murdered nine young children. Mike will be overseeing Milly’s therapy until the trial and is eager for her to fit into his family. However, Milly, who narrates the book, senses that something isn’t right between Saskia and Phoebe, and Phoebe, along with her friends, immediately starts a campaign of terror against the newcomer, whom she sees as an intruder in her family. Milly does find a friend in a younger girl, Morgan, who obviously has family problems of her own, but as the trial looms, Milly struggles to be the good person she longs to be even as the voice of her mother pushes her to give in to her darker urges. Can Milly find her own way, or is she a slave to her upbringing? Land, a mental health nurse, puts her knowledge to good use in her portrayal of Milly, who was raised by a sexually abusive monster who recruited her to play a role in her unspeakable crimes. A sense of creeping dread drives the narrative, and that most fascinating of crime-novel subjects, the female serial killer, casts a formidable shadow. Milly wages a war within herself that she may or may not win. Readers will be more than happy to go along for the ride and may be surprised how they feel about the conclusion, proving the unmistakable spell that Land has cast.
Sly, unsettling, and impossible to put down.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-08764-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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