A fast, fulfilling read with plenty of twists.
An offbeat whodunit that will prompt readers to wonder: Did “it” actually happen?
In his fifth novel, Harries seems to blend elements of memoir and fiction as he tells the complex story of his ancestors, inspired by taking a genetic ancestry test. In a style that calls to mind the Sherlock Holmes tales, the author methodically excavates the roots of his family tree and uncovers a dark “family business.” His initial research focuses on his great-grandfather Abram Isakowitsch, who moved from his native Riga to the United Kingdom in 1888. Nothing so strange about that, but it’s not long until the events that Harries recounts start to stretch credulity. Isakowitsch changes his name to Abraham Harris, whom government documents identify as a tailor—an occupation he never held. Shockers start early on with the author’s discovery that his great-grandfather owned a pub where one of Jack the Ripper’s victims was last seen. Even more jaw-dropping details follow, as “Harris” was a former operative of the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, for whom he was a prized assassin (last known body count: 78). When panic began to grip London in 1888 over the Ripper murders, Britain’s prime minister, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, recruited Harris to track down and assassinate the infamous serial killer, according to the author’s research. The book slides between different time periods as Harris recounts adventures and misadventures of other ancestors. The chapter format makes it easy to follow the tangled timelines by listing the dates, locations, and cast of characters at the start of each. Later, the author learns, his mother’s great-aunt Mina Kapelus (a member of the Left SR Party) participated in a botched attempt to assassinate Lenin in 1918; in response, the Bolsheviks killed her and displayed her coffin on the street. Or did they? Harries teases readers with a subtitle that brands the book of “Dubious Veracity,” and he quips before the story begins, “The truth may be stranger than fiction, but it’s not as much fun. That is, of course, if you believe I’m not telling the truth.” Throughout, he displays consummate skill as a spinner of mysteries, and he recounts them all with a welcome and unexpected dash of humor.
A fast, fulfilling read with plenty of twists.Pub Date: June 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-950628-08-7
Page Count: 307
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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