A perfect winter night's haunting.
Five writers, four weeks, and a $1 million book deal for the lucky winner. Unless they disappear first….
Having just turned 30, Alex has to face up to some hard truths: She hates her job; she’s been miserable since breaking up with her best friend; and she’s mired in writer’s block, which makes it pretty hard to be discovered and published. Then, a call from the blue: A writer friend has finagled her a space at an elite writers retreat at the estate of the mysterious, glamorous novelist Roza Vallo. From the very first night at Blackbriar, though, it’s clear that this is no warm and fuzzy workshop, and Roza is no gentle mentor. Each writer must craft a proposal for a full-length novel, then crank out 3,000 words a day to be critiqued. Despite the trappings of luxury—food and wine and an unparalleled library—there’s no ignoring the fact that the writers are trapped; there’s no Wi-Fi or cell service to be found. For Alex, the sense of disquiet grows as her research deepens; with Roza’s urging, she has decided to write a novel about the original inhabitants of the house, a wealthy tycoon and his waitress-turned-medium wife who were both found dead after the wife apparently channeled a demoness named Lamia. When one of the other writers disappears, Alex can’t help but wonder whether occult history is repeating itself. Or is there a much more sinister (and human) plot behind this writing retreat? Despite Alex’s somewhat whiny nature, the book's pacing—a slow roll of dread and horror, especially in the first half—is exceptional. Bartz hits all the gothic highlights, but, far from feeling stale, they work.
A perfect winter night's haunting.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9945-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
An irresistible hook, endless intricate complications, plucked heartstrings aplenty, and an inevitably disappointing windup.
Twenty-two years after waking up in Spain fouled with the blood of his lover of five days, an unlicensed investigator sees her alive once more in this dizzying standalone mystery.
Or maybe not. There’s no indication that anyone’s seen the woman Sami Kierce knew only as Anna since their last night together, which ended when he woke up in her bed clutching a bloody knife. And although the woman who crashes No Shit, Sherlock, the class Sami’s run for wannabe investigators ever since getting bounced from the NYPD after a rooftop pursuit left his quarry dead, looks just like Anna—well, it’s been over two decades, and all the evidence points to her actually being Victoria Belmond, the daughter of self-made millionaire Archie Belmond. Victoria has her own troubled history. She vanished from a New Year’s Eve party she was co-hosting three years before Sami’s fling with Anna and wasn’t seen again, except maybe by Sami, for 11 long years. Already unsettled because Tad Grayson, who was convicted on Sami’s testimony of murdering Nicole Brett, Sami’s fiancée, has been released because the court can’t trust the testimony of a dishonored cop, Sami meets with Belmond, who offers to share some personal information with him along with $100,000 if he signs a nondisclosure agreement and then offers half a million to dig up the truth behind Victoria’s presumed kidnapping. Just what is the truth about Anna? As Sami puts it: “She was Victoria. And she was not.”
An irresistible hook, endless intricate complications, plucked heartstrings aplenty, and an inevitably disappointing windup.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781538756355
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
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