After a case in which he was very much the main story (The Hunting Dogs, 2014), it’s good to see Wisting cast once more as...
Veteran Chief Inspector William Wisting of the Larvik Police Department is faced with a pair of unusual cases: two men who were dead for four months before anyone so much as missed them.
The U.N. may consider Norway the best country in the world, but it’s still possible for some people to live and die in such lonely isolation that no one notices. One such person is Wisting’s neighbor Viggo Hansen, whose virtually mummified corpse is discovered sitting in front of his television only because he hasn’t paid his utility bill. Another is the anonymous victim found beneath the snow at a Christmas tree farm without a mark to indicate how he died four months earlier. Genre fans will immediately suspect that the two deaths are neither innocuous nor unconnected. But since Wisting focuses on trying to identify the snowbound corpse while his daughter, Line, an investigative journalist, toils in alternating chapters to recover a back story for the neighbor she never really knew, the two cases don’t begin to converge, or even to establish themselves as criminal cases, until they’re both linked to Robert Godwin, the Interstate Strangler who escaped the police in Minneapolis years ago and went to ground in Norway in a surprising, logical, and deeply disturbing fashion. Horst keeps the long second act in which Wisting works with an international task force while Line interviews one acquaintance of Viggo’s after another brimming with tension, slowly building suspense as the two searches cross paths in increasingly intricate ways; only the much briefer and more melodramatic third act, which inevitably makes the search personal for Wisting, is disappointingly predictable.
After a case in which he was very much the main story (The Hunting Dogs, 2014), it’s good to see Wisting cast once more as the dogged detective in this solid, unspectacular procedural.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-910124-04-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2015
BOOK TO SCREEN
Sundance Now to Air TV Show of Wisting Mysteries
Fans who don’t think the supporting cases run away with the story will marvel at Connelly’s remarkable ability to keep them...
Harry Bosch, who just can’t stay retired, unwillingly teams up with a Hollywood detective who has reasons of her own for wanting in on his latest cold case.
It may be nine years since 15-year-old runaway Daisy Clayton was grabbed from the streets of Los Angeles and killed, but the daily presence of her mother, Elizabeth, in Harry’s life—she’s staying at his place while he helps her stay clean—makes it a foregone conclusion that he’ll reopen the case. On the night Bosch drops into Hollywood Division to sneak a look at some of the old files, he’s caught by Detective Renée Ballard, who was bounced from LAPD Robbery/Homicide to “the late show,” Hollywood’s third shift, after her complaint about aggressive harassment by a superior went nowhere. Bosch needs to find out who was responsible for what happened to Daisy; Ballard needs to work a case with teeth, even if she’s partnering with a reserve investigator in the San Fernando Police Department (Two Kinds of Truth, 2017, etc.) who’d rather work alone. Before they get what they need, they’ll have to wade through a double caseload as grueling and sometimes as maddeningly routine as you can imagine, from an apparent murder that turns out to be a slip-and-fall to an ancient gang killing whose repercussions flare to sudden life to the theft of some valuable Andy Warhol prints to a missing man who’s not just missing—not to mention Elizabeth’s sudden disappearance and Ballard’s continuing lack of support, and sometimes even backup, from her department. Not even the canniest readers are likely to see which of these byways will end up leading to the long-overdue solution to the riddle of Daisy Clayton’s death.
Fans who don’t think the supporting cases run away with the story will marvel at Connelly’s remarkable ability to keep them all not only suitably mystifying, but deeply humane, as if he were the Ross Macdonald of the police procedural.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-48480-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Sure, it’s kind of a rip-off, but it’s scary, it’s fun, and it’s one hell of a carnival ride.
Comedy duo and YouTube superstars McLaughlin and Neal (Rhett & Link’s Book of Mythicality, 2017) craft a novel about things that go bump in the night.
Stranger Things carries a lot of cultural weight by itself these days—the legacy of Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, and the many weird movies and books that don’t get the credit they deserve—but these comedy writers have hit that vein hard with this VHS-era kicker that references the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Kickboxer on the very first page. This is Bleak Creek, North Carolina, circa the early 1990s. We have three buddies, natch: Rex McClendon, whose dad owns a funeral home; his bestie, Lief Nelson; and their mutual crush, Alicia Boykins. They’re making PolterDog, an indie movie, because why not? Anyone who grew up in this era will be delighted by all the pop-culture references, from Goodfellas to Smokey and the Bandit. Of course, we need some reasonable adults around to help, too, so we get Janine Blitstein, a filmmaker just graduated from NYU film school, and her cousin Donna Lowe. Things get creepy in a hurry when Alicia is banished because of “bad behavior” to a local private school called Whitewood, founded in 1979. The big bad here is Wayne Whitewood, head of the school where every student is robbed of an identity and known only as “Candidatus”—Whitewood is the so-named “Keeper,” assisted by the Nurse Ratched–esque “Helper.” All the students are threatened at every turn by torture, most commonly “The Roll,” in which they’re confined in a carpet for days on end. Of course, there's a rescue mission, but because we’re in that Stephen King territory, there are also a bunch of supernatural threats, including a cursed spring and something known only as “The One Below.”
Sure, it’s kind of a rip-off, but it’s scary, it’s fun, and it’s one hell of a carnival ride.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984822-13-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
