A complicated plot, richly drawn characters, and a vein of horror will keep readers devouring the pages.
Private detective Charlie Parker faces a pair of otherworldly foes in a crime novel packed with colorful characters.
In the Maine woods, rain exposes the body of a woman buried in a shallow grave. An autopsy reveals she had given birth a day or two before her death, but whether she was murdered or not is unclear. There is no sign of the child’s body, and a Star of David has been carved on a nearby tree. Meanwhile, 5-year-old Daniel Weaver lives with his mother, Holly—she is “blond,” he is “ebony.” She tells him a story of The Woman in the Woods, “spirited away by an ogre.” Daniel’s toy phone rings throughout the book, and he hears the voice of a strange woman. And in Cadillac, Indiana, an Englishman named Quayle inquires about a pregnant “mongrel [bitch]” named Karis Lamb who had passed through town. Quayle, who might be “the devil himself,” has one purpose on Earth: “to locate a single book, and enable it to do its work.” It’s the Fractured Atlas, which he expects will change the world, replacing the “Old God” with “Not-Gods.” Not knowing Karis’ fate, he tracks down and kills those protecting her because she may know the book’s whereabouts. His delightfully disgusting companion, Pallida Mors, has “the skin of a drowning victim, and the eyes of a doll.” Attorney Moxie Castin, who calls himself "Jewish-ish," hires private detective Parker to find Karis' child, "because I want to believe that child is alive." But Parker faces frightful foes. Every character is expertly drawn—Parker’s friends Louis and Angel are a pair of gay criminals, and Louis, who is black, blows up a Chevy truck that was flying Confederate flags. The owner, Billy Ocean, learned from his daddy not to use racial slurs, but he really hates “Negroes.” Quayle hates everybody, and his racism is just a part of his overall rottenness. There’s also a group of rich people called the Backers, who ages ago sold out to dark, arcane forces. Some of them think Parker is “partly divine” because he’s survived so many attacks.
A complicated plot, richly drawn characters, and a vein of horror will keep readers devouring the pages.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7192-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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