Phony mix of thrills, chills, and touchy moments about a family finding itself.
A second novel (after Boys Still Missing, 2001) strains painfully to shock and move as it details the consequences of a teenager’s death in a prom-night car accident.
In suburban Pennsylvania, Melissa Moody, Ronnie Chase’s date for the prom, still cherishes all the mementoes of their romance—photographs, even the bloodstained dress she was wearing the night she was badly scarred and Ronnie was killed. Ronnie’s father has subsequently married a younger wife; meanwhile, Charlene, his mother and a former librarian, is bingeing on pills and food; and older brother Phillip, a would-be poet who fled to New York, is back home and spending his days reading the biography of Anne Sexton. One evening five years after the accident, Melissa suddenly turns up pregnant and announces that she has a message from Ronnie: the child is his, and Ronnie wants Philip to go on writing poetry. Philip is skeptical, but Charlene, desperate for any shred of comfort, tries to finds out whether any of Ronnie’s semen could have been kept frozen in a lab. As Charlene makes tentative moves to recovery, Melissa, who lives in a shack owned by former policeman Bill Erwin and his wife Gail and is due to deliver any day, is asked by Gail to move out, as she’s behind in her rent. Gail has her reasons: she’s discovered that Bill may have sexually assaulted a number of young women by drugging them with pills Gail found in the basement. Philip and Melissa’s recollections of their pasts—more set pieces than credible insights—pad out the story, which soon becomes violent. Bill, who realizes that Gail suspects the truth about his past, attacks her—and then Phillip, searching for Melissa, sees black birds pecking at something in the nearby woods. The tension is as predictable and contrived as the happy ending.
Phony mix of thrills, chills, and touchy moments about a family finding itself.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-688-17571-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
A proficient, mounting-stakes actioner that proves Scottoline is just as comfortable with a shrink determined to go to the...
A sociopath targets a suburban Pennsylvania psychiatrist whose success is only the prelude to a series of nightmarish reversals.
It’s true that Dr. Eric Parrish doesn’t have everything. His wife, Caitlin, is divorcing him and being difficult over the joint custody they’ve arranged for their 7-year-old daughter, Hannah, and his latest private patient, 17-year-old Max Jakubowski, seems much more in need of help than his dying grandmother does. But Eric’s colleagues like and admire him—one of them, medical student Kristine Malin, is clearly in hot pursuit—and so does U.S. News and World Report, which is about to announce that the psych unit Eric heads at Havemeyer General Hospital ranks second in the nation. It all goes south with a suddenness that would be shocking outside the pages of Scottoline. Kristine files harassment charges after Eric rejects her come-on. Max phones Eric to say that his grandmother’s died and then takes a powder. Renée Bevilacqua, a girl Max tutors in math and otherwise worships from afar, gets murdered the morning after Eric follows her home, looking in vain for a lead to Max’s whereabouts. The cops haul Eric in as a person of interest, then invade his office and home looking for evidence when he demands they find Max, whom he considers a suicide risk, but won’t say any more about him. The colleagues who so recently toasted Eric lock him out. And that’s all before Max takes five teenagers hostage and announces that he’s going to kill one every 15 minutes before he blows up the King of Prussia Mall. Who can possibly be pulling so many different strings?
A proficient, mounting-stakes actioner that proves Scottoline is just as comfortable with a shrink determined to go to the wall for a troubled teen as she ever was with Bennie Rosato’s all-female law practice (Betrayed, 2014, etc.).Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-01011-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Simultaneously melancholy and sweet at its core.
A body washed up on the shore of Lake Superior moves a family to rewrite its 100-year history in Webb's (The Vanishing, 2014, etc.) new novel, set equally in each era.
Lake Superior, which has always been known for its legends, one day reveals a new mystery when an unidentified body clutching an equally dead baby washes up on the shore near Kate Granger’s family home. Kate, who’s come to town only recently in an attempt to recover from a breakup with her philandering husband, is captivated by the young woman, who’s been appearing to her in dreams. Police know the family too well to suspect Kate was involved in the crime, and she’s allowed to travel within the area to stay with her cousin Simon at the Harrison’s House, a stately former family home the unerringly nice Simon inherited and that he and his partner, Jonathan, have revamped into a B&B. Interspersed with chapters about Kate’s search for the identity of the body is the story of Great Bay in 1889 and the early life of Addie Cassatt and her friend Jess Stewart. Addie’s story sounds almost like a fable, from her birth in a lake that seems to love her to her first meeting with Jess, a boy who seems fated to be always by her side. Things grow more complicated when Jess goes away to college and begins to wonder about life beyond his small town and to ask whether Addie can be the woman he needs to help him achieve his professional dreams. As Addie learns about the limits of love, Kate learns that love may return when she’s introduced to Nick, a police officer willing to invest as much time in identifying the body as Kate is. With the support of Simon and Nick, Kate tries to learn from her dreams and believe the impossible, even if it means connecting the body to a centuries-old mystery entangled with Kate and Simon’s own family history.
Simultaneously melancholy and sweet at its core.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0082-0
Page Count: 347
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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