A mostly plodding mystery wrapped in religious contemplation.
In Nix’s novel, a young woman wrestles with her family’s conservative Christian beliefs when her sister goes missing.
The narrative begins with the murder of an unnamed pregnant woman. The story then flashes back to introduce Kazie Oxmore, a struggling college student with a strict mother named Marie. Her roommate, Madison, is her closest friend. A professor who teaches one of Kazie’s classes, former pastor David Edmunds, is having dreams about the devil. Kazie takes a dim view of her family’s religiosity and resents her teenage sister, Callie, for being the golden child, but when Callie calls Kazie to announce she’s pregnant, Kazie returns home to provide support. Kazie tries to talk Callie out of keeping the baby (“I know it’s very serious, but sometimes abortion may simply be the best choice for everyone involved”). When Callie breaks the news to their mother, Marie blames Kazie for the situation, and Kazie feels even more alienated from her family. She decides to go to David for advice. He listens, and they both find themselves attracted to each other. David’s friend, a fellow professor named William Elders, is enamored with Madison. Before either of these romances can develop, Callie disappears. The text includes a lot of criticism, little of it subtle, of the church and Christians; much of it comes in the form of conversations between the characters, as the novel has little action but plenty of scenes of people sitting around talking about religion. The beginning of the narrative is very heavy with exposition, and the story takes a bit of time to get rolling. Still, Nix delivers well-crafted prose, and Kazie stands out as a well-rounded, complex character. The novel might interest readers seeking deep discussions of religion, but it doesn’t quite hold together as a satisfying thriller.
A mostly plodding mystery wrapped in religious contemplation.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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