A haunting, impressive procedural with a distractingly jarring ending.
A Newsday reporter offers a fictional reimagining of a still-open case involving the 1955 disappearance of a Long Island toddler.
In a prologue set in Wisconsin, 51-year-old Robert Charles Landsness is at his mother’s deathbed, urging her to “tell me the God-damn truth.” He has “never quite been comfortable” in his military family, and he has visions of happier, distant past in a “beautiful suburban home.” His mother muses to herself about the “the night Robert had come to her” in 1955 Panama City, but she dies before answering his plea. The novel then jumps back to 1955 to unfurl a tale of young Long Island mom Colleen Goodson, who briefly leaves her 3-year-old son Bobby, along with his baby sister, outside an IGA supermarket, then returns to find them gone. The daughter is quickly found, but Bobby remains missing, resulting in “the largest search in the young history of Nassau County” in New York state. Local police pursue various false leads, at one point questioning a Black family whose car was seen in the area around the time of the disappearance. An ambitious young reporter scores an interview with Colleen, who, like her Air Force-base employee husband, appears strained and oddly detached. The Goodsons receive several ransom notes, but these prove to be the work of at least one opportunistic prankster. As years go by, the Goodsons divorce and move back to their native Kansas. When Landsness later claims to be Bobby Goodson, a new team of detectives reopens the case. By novel’s end, the mystery is solved after heading a surprising new direction.
Nine-time Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Valenti, whose verse is included in the anthology 13 Poets from Long Island (2023), provides In Cold Blood-like depth to this fictionalized account of what this book’s subtitle notes is “One of the Oldest Unsolved Missing Child Cases in U.S. History.” In real life, 2-year-old Steven Damman disappeared while left unattended in front of a Long Island bakery in 1955, and he was never found. Valenti’s depiction of Colleen is particularly nuanced and multifaceted, noting her flaws and limitations while also the addressing emotional consequences of her abusive childhood; it also effectively explores how she was suspected of killing her own child. Valenti also dramatizes the scope and painstaking work of the police investigation, which grimly included scrutiny of area parents who recently lost children and may have been looking for a replacement. However, Valenti’s conclusion to the story is unbelievably convoluted, necessitating a rather complicated backstory. Many other elements of the story, however, are close to those of the actual case, which had many strange turns, including someone claiming 50 years later that he may have been the kidnapped child. An afterword separating fact from fiction would have been welcome, though, and readers will want to know how much Valenti reported on this fascinating case. Still, the book strikingly captures the angst of its well-sketched character, resulting in an often compelling read.
A haunting, impressive procedural with a distractingly jarring ending.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798988919353
Page Count: -
Publisher: BUSHWICKBORN PRODUCTIONS, INC. / POPE BROTHERS INK
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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