A fiery, absorbing, impressive crime fiction procedural sure to shake up fans of the genre and introduce readers to a new...
A determined, empowered detective looking into two intense cases fuels this suspense thriller debut.
Magnetically drawn to police work from a young age because she “loved to discover secrets,” Santa Fe, New Mexico, officer Michelle Velasquez will find her mettle tested when she is assigned a cold case on top of a sexual assault investigation. The current case involves the rape of Maria Acevedo, a new hire at Jones Financial who was violently molested by an executive who threatened retaliation if she reported the event. Bent on avenging Acevedo’s attack, Velasquez digs deep into the case, but complicating matters is the reappearance of Richard Stanberry III, an arrogant, judgmental, and irritatingly persistent old friend from her past intent on worming his way back into her life if only to convince her that police work is too “degrading” for her. Worse still is an additional assignment of a 3-decade-old cold case involving the murder of Susie Murphy, who was Stanberry’s girlfriend and a friend of Velasquez’s at the time she was killed. This task proves to be just as complex as the rape investigation, as Velasquez diligently sifts through 30 years of history to expose a rising tide of prime suspects like Stanberry. Lending the book a well-rounded sense of development, Reichwein’s mystery is effectively narrated by a chorus of characters, ranging from Susie’s mother to the murder victim’s psychotic stalker/mailman and her college friend Cassie. They all provide a compelling backstory for the cold case, which ends up becoming the novel’s primary focus. Though readers will get intimately familiar with all of the players in this well-honed whodunit, it will be tough, resilient, seasoned detective Velasquez who remains the most solid character and who has enough brio to anchor the story through its rousing conclusion. There are some rough patches of awkward exposition and clunky dialogue, and the female equality message, while provocative and certainly timely, tends to be overly repetitive and heavy-handed. But overall, the brisk plot and compelling characterization more than make up for these narrative quibbles.
A fiery, absorbing, impressive crime fiction procedural sure to shake up fans of the genre and introduce readers to a new author with great potential.Pub Date: March 9, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 283
Publisher: Best Seller Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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