A dark and impressive murder tale.
This thriller places a newspaper reporter in the thick of a small town’s grisliest crime.
The residents don’t lock their doors in the Austin County town of Failey. On the night before Halloween, Lotty Nusbaumer babysits Emily Russell, 11; her brother, Kyle, 9; and Timothy Crawford, 10. Aunt Lotty, as generations of neighbors have come to know her, has the kids making Halloween decorations in her double-wide trailer. Then someone enters. That someone shoots Lotty and the children, leaving them to bleed out. Deputy Amos “Moze” T. Beard is eating breakfast at Hack’s diner with Mirror-Press reporter Ambrose Clay when he’s called to the crime scene. Clay joins him at the scene, the initial sight of which causes 21-year-old Moze to toss his breakfast. Against police protocol, Clay enters the trailer, noting details such as a .22 rifle jammed and bent into the toilet. As cops and bystanders arrive, the reporter follows a wooded ridge to the police-taped property of Orlo Ratliff. The elderly man’s home is where Lotty, the only survivor of the shooting, stumbled for help. Days after the crime, Clay is unable to locate Lotty for an interview. Instead he must contend with Naomi Crawford, Timothy’s spotlight-hungry mother; Potter Crandall, a no-nonsense prosecutor who warns Clay against compromising the investigation; and Janelle S. Wheeler, a younger reporter from the Chronicle, a larger paper. And as if Clay needed a meatier case to gnaw on, he receives a chilly call from an individual who’s “very disappointed” to learn that Aunt Lotty lives. In this pugnacious Midwestern thriller, Gastineau (The Judge’s Brief, 2017) takes readers to 1994, the middle of a decade filled with vicious headline-makers like Theodore “the Unabomber” Kaczynski and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Clay, an overweight, recovering alcoholic, muses about the crime: He had “entertained some previously unrealized hope of leaving this kind of thing behind in Chicago,” where he learned reporting. The author’s characters spar verbally at every turn, and his dialogue should be delicious to those readers who savor carefully portioned details. Orlo says that he and Lotty are lovers, but “I ain’t s’posed to show up” at her trailer “till it’s good and goddamned dark.” The novel’s title refers to the notion that, as reporters, “if you must have an opinion about the facts...use the fourth person: find a source and make them say it.” Clay’s dealings with interviewees are quite slippery, and his constant jousting against law enforcement regarding what information can be released is so entertaining that the criminal trial portion of the narrative feels like a bonus. Events move organically, and Gastineau’s work feels akin to classics like Helter Skelter and In Cold Blood. An aura of moral rot is captured by a witness on the stand: “Throughout her direct testimony, her expression was dreamy....She was a Jonestown girl; she’d drink the Kool-Aid and ask for more.” While the case drifts slightly here and there, readers should eagerly follow Clay’s heavy step.
A dark and impressive murder tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 455
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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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