A confused and ultimately unsatisfying mystery thriller.
In Ojih’s debut mystery novel, a newspaper editor gets entangled in a murder investigation.
It’s 1975, andHarry Robertsonworks as the news editor for a small newspaper in the sleepy Baltimore suburb of Middle River, Maryland. The paper is owned by the wealthy Rev. Reginald Waters, who also happens to be Harry’s pastor. One day, Harry, who’s on the cusp of a promotion, gets an unusual request from the reverend, who is about to leave for Europe for several months: He needs Harry to pick up his daughter from the airport and drive her to the family’s large estate. It turns out that Harry and Brittany Waters, a recent college dropout, have palpable sexual chemistry. Although he’s afraid that word will get back to the pastor, Harry sleeps with Brittany and agrees to meet her in Atlantic City, New Jersey, later that summer. Later, he learns that she was possibly involved with a Trenton gangster who was murdered a few years earlier. Still, Harry heads out to see her, but he discovers her corpse in the backyard of the house she’s rented. Harry quickly flees, reasonably sure that nobody will know he was there, and heads back to Middle River. Soon, police discover Brittany’s body, and Harry finds himself at the center of a swarm of reporters, cops, politicians, and mobsters, each with their own motivations and loyalties. Can Harry keep himself out of jail and help identify the real killer? He quickly comes to understand something his father said to him long ago: “Nobody chooses the devil, son; the devil chooses you.”
Harry’s story features many of the classic tropes that fans of noirish mysteries will enjoy: a femme fatale, political intrigue, and a shocking murder in a lonely beach house. However, the novel’s momentum is often impeded by distracting details. For example, Harry works for the tiny Middle River Times, and the promotion he’s angling for is at the paper’s satellite office in Trenton; it’s never explained why a local Maryland paper has a second office in a different and nonadjacent state. The author also shows a lack of facility with conversational speech and, especially, figurative language: “I’m as unwelcome to her as an outbreak of Ebola fever,” Brittany says at one point, and a bit later, Harry awkwardly narrates, “From my personal experience with women, I have come to conclude that a relationship with a woman like Brittany is like food in a microwave oven: it can turn from lukewarm to scalding hot in a matter of a few days.” In addition, Harry, who seems more concerned about his own job security than the fact that a woman he knew is dead, comes off as a far less sympathetic protagonist than the author seems to mean him to be. The overall plot is convoluted, and the stakes for the various characters are often unclear. In the end, the novel never finds the sort of smooth momentum that appeals to longtime mystery readers.
A confused and ultimately unsatisfying mystery thriller.Pub Date: July 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-71784-927-4
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2022
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
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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