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
Fans of literate mysteries will appreciate the complex but realistic story, the satisfying resolution and the descriptive...
The "See-No-Evil" serial killer is jailed awaiting trial, and the last thing Sheriff's Detective Tony Mendez needs is another murder victim, especially a beautiful young woman brutally stabbed and slashed.
Marissa Fordham, a rising young artist and the protégé of the wealthy Milo Bordain, is discovered murdered in her isolated cottage. Haley, her 4-year-old daughter, rests badly injured on her mother's bloody corpse. Mendez catches the case, ably assisted by Vince Leone, a retired FBI profiler who helped solve the "See-No-Evil" mystery. Leone has retired and married a local teacher, Anne Navarre, who was almost murdered by the jailed serial killer. Anne is now studying child psychology and working as a court-appointed special advocate in juvenile cases, and she persuades a reluctant Vince to let her care for Haley. That necessary and time-consuming task deflects her from counseling an apparently psychopathic middle-school student who has stabbed a classmate. Mendez and Leone have more than one suspect in Marissa's brutal murder, even though the victim isn't all—or is more than—she seems to be. Hoag (Deeper Than the Dead, 2009, etc.) again stages her mystery in Oak Knoll, a fictional town somewhere near the beautiful landscape surrounding Santa Barbara and Lompoc, Calif., and her gift for description makes the area come alive. The author also discovers a suitable set of suspects ranging from Bordain's Mercedes-dealer son, a mathematical genius and college professor with Asperger's Syndrome and mother issues, and a prosperous and adulterous attorney who may or may not have been linked to the "See-No-Evil" serial killer. The good guys are less dramatic, although Hoag's character sketches are memorable, right down to minor players like the county sheriff, Cal Dixon.
Fans of literate mysteries will appreciate the complex but realistic story, the satisfying resolution and the descriptive writing.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-525-95192-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
More perhaps than any of Connelly’s much-honored other titles, this one reveals why his procedurals are the most soulful in...
The 30th novel by the creator of Harry Bosch (The Wrong Side of Goodbye, 2016, etc.) and the Lincoln Lawyer (The Gods of Guilt, 2013, etc.) introduces an LAPD detective fighting doggedly for justice for herself and a wide array of victims.
Ever since her partner, Detective Ken Chastain, failed to back up her sexual harassment claim against Lt. Robert Olivas, her supervisor at the Robbery Homicide Division, Renée Ballard has been banished to the midnight shift—the late show. She’s kept her chin down and worked her cases, most of which are routinely passed on to the day shifts, without complaints or recriminations. But that all ends the night she and Detective John Jenkins, the partner who’s running on empty, are called to The Dancers, a nightclub where five people have been shot dead. Three of them—a bookie, a drug dealer, and a rumored mob enforcer—are no great loss, but Ballard can’t forget Cynthia Haddel, the young woman serving drinks while she waited for her acting career to take off. The case naturally falls to Olivas, who humiliatingly shunts Ballard aside. But she persists in following leads during her time off even though she’d already caught another case earlier the same night, the brutal assault on Ramona Ramone, ne Ramón Gutierrez, a trans hooker beaten nearly to death who mumbles something about “the upside-down house” before lapsing into a coma. Despite, or because of, the flak she gets from across the LAPD, Ballard soldiers on, horrified but energized when Chastain is gunned down only a few hours after she tells him off for the way he let her down two years ago. She’ll run into layers of interference, get kidnapped herself, expose a leak in the department, kill a man, and find some wholly unexpected allies before she claps the cuffs on the killer in a richly satisfying conclusion.
More perhaps than any of Connelly’s much-honored other titles, this one reveals why his procedurals are the most soulful in the business: because he finds the soul in the smallest details, faithfully executed.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-22598-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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