by Judy Bruce ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 22, 2018
Another fine series entry featuring a well-rounded heroine whose psychic abilities are just some of her gifts.
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A psychic small-town lawyer in western Nebraska investigates a double murder in this fifth installment of Bruce’s mystery series.
“Life calmed down a bit—I hadn’t killed anyone for several weeks.” So begins Megan Docket, 29, in describing her latest adventure. Though not a violent person, Megan just seems to invite the kind of trouble that requires lethal self-defense. A lawyer in small-town Dexter, Nebraska, Megan has a gift: She hears the voices of the dead in the wind sweeping the dry bluffs near her house and gets psychic impressions of danger, whether past or to come. She has a good relationship with local law enforcement—in one case, especially good. She’s dating Lt. Jay Young, a sheriff with the State Patrol. So when Megan is asked to look into the deaths of Junior and Val Percival, she’s allowed to thoroughly investigate. Re-experiencing the events and sensing evil, Megan is sure it’s murder by a third party, not a murder-suicide. Megan happens to be the executor for the couple’s estate, which is unwelcome news to Kenny and Helen Percival, now guardians to Junior and Val’s 15-year-old son, Mitch, who is profoundly autistic. With the help of her close-knit group of family and friends, Megan untangles snarled threads, including a family feud and insurance fraud. She also wonders whether to trust Jay and her deepening feelings, especially after a disastrous visit to his family at Christmas. Bruce (Fire in the Wind, 2017, etc.) keeps up a crackling pace in her fifth Docket novel, helping the reader keep track of a large cast through good exposition and a cast list. Megan’s psychic abilities help nudge her in the right direction but aren’t overly convenient, giving her room to demonstrate her lawyerly and investigative chops. As with the previous novels, Megan’s personality interestingly blends compassion and practicality. She’ll kill if she has to but pleads with God, “Please don’t let me be evil.” A few clever surprises keep readers guessing until a satisfying outcome.
Another fine series entry featuring a well-rounded heroine whose psychic abilities are just some of her gifts.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 239
Publisher: Merriam Press
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Judy Bruce
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by Judy Bruce
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by Judy Bruce
by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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by Harper Lee
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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