An entertaining, richly textured suspense yarn with a spirited hero.
A one-legged private eye searches for a missing heiress while navigating mayhem on the mean streets of Portland, Maine, in this mystery.
This knotty first installment of the Dee Rommel series finds the fledgling shamus working at G&Z Investigations while on disability leave from the Portland Police Department after she was knocked off a roof by a perp and had her lower left leg amputated. She’s hired by local tech zillionaire Philip Claren to find his daughter, Lucy, a brainy, 20-something research scientist. Lucy’s gone off the grid just 10 days before her wedding to a young PR man named Tyler Peppard, whom Claren takes a dim view of. Assisted by her friend Jade, an IT whiz who can get into any encrypted file or database, Dee delves into the Claren clan’s underbelly. The excavation turns up Lucy’s rich, prickly mother; an Ecstasy-enabled, extortion-porn plot; and a sinister artificial intelligence company’s scheme to surveil people by implanting them with microchips. Dee also gets major subplots heaped on her plate. A liquor salesman who hit on her at a bar turns up dead, and she gets involved in another missing woman case when her hairdresser friend Karla Ackerman disappears. The latter riddle deepens when Dee finds Karla badly beaten in a motel and too traumatized to talk. Then, town terror Billy Payer, whom Dee and Karla testified against at his assault-and-battery trial, gets out of prison and pursues his calling of menacing everyone he comes across. Along the way, Dee fields romantic interest from canny police colleague Detective Robbie Donato and “the Reader,” a flirty knight errant who’s into motorcycles and Dickens novels.
Selbo’s busy plot creaks occasionally. The mystery’s mechanism sometimes needs people who have good reason to explain things to not explain them and others to give Dee notes clarifying things out of the blue when she’s clueless. But the narrative usually earns its keep with nifty, engrossing procedural, including Dee’s locomotion tactics—how she manages the complicated process of moving around and even climbing a tree with her prosthesis. (“I swing my good leg up and use my abs to lift the rest of my weight. Hurts like hell.”) The author grounds the story in an atmospheric portrait of a Portland divided between yuppified quaintness and working-class grit and where everyone has a shared past. Her characters are sharply etched by Dee’s always observant voice. (“The lights of the cameras hit two reflective points on” Tyler: “one on the excessive Rolex on his left wrist and the other on his shiny, pointy, steel-toed boots. He looks like an arrogant dickwad.”) In Selbo’s punchy, vivid prose, Dee is hard-boiled when she needs to be, but her injury gives her a vulnerability and interiority that deepen her. (“My goddamn leg thinks it’s whole again; the knee thinks it’s connected to a calf and ankle and foot—thinks it has muscles, tissue, fat, tendons, veins, arteries and bones all in place to keep blood flowing from my left extremity to my heart….Of course, I know it’s my brain dipping into the past; imagining the tickle of fresh sheets and the heat of a calloused hand stroking the length of my leg.”) Readers will root for her as she steps gamely into every peril.
An entertaining, richly textured suspense yarn with a spirited hero.Pub Date: July 31, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-95-062739-4
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Pandamoon Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
A standout in the series.
The sixth adventure of Harvard symbology professor Robert Langdon explores the mysteries of human consciousness, the demonic projects of the CIA, and the city of Prague.
“Ladies and gentlemen...we are about to experience a sea change in our understanding of how the brain works, the nature of consciousness, and in fact…the very nature of reality itself.” But first—Langdon’s in love! Brown’s devoted readers first met brilliant noetic scientist Katherine Solomon in The Lost Symbol (2009); she’s back as a serious girlfriend, engaging the committed bachelor in a way not seen before. The book opens with the pair in a luxurious suite at the Four Seasons in Prague. It’s the night after Katherine has delivered the lecture quoted above, setting the theme for the novel, which features a plethora of real-life cases and anomalies that seem to support the notion that human consciousness is not localized inside the human skull. Brown’s talent for assembling research is also evident in this novel’s alter ego as a guidebook to Prague, whose history and attractions are described in great and glowing detail. Whether you appreciate or skim past the innumerable info dumps on these and other topics (Jewish folklore fans—the Golem is in the house!), it goes without saying that concision is not a goal in the Dan Brown editing process. Speaking of editing, the nearly 700-page book is dedicated to Brown’s editor, who seems to appear as a character—to put it in the italicized form used for Brownian insight, Jason Kaufman must be Jonas Faukman! A major subplot involves the theft of Katherine’s manuscript from the secure servers of Penguin Random House; the delightful Faukman continues to spout witty wisecracks even when blindfolded and hogtied. There’s no shortage of action, derring-do, explosions, high-tech torture machines, attempted and successful murders, and opportunities for split-second, last-minute escapes; good thing Langdon, this aging symbology wonk, never misses swimming his morning laps. Readers who are not already dyed-in-the-wool Langdonites may find themselves echoing the prof’s own conclusion regarding the credibility of all this paranormal hoo-ha: At some point, skepticism itself becomes irrational.
A standout in the series.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9780385546898
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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