Wassmer’s main contributions to the familiar village murder-cum-not-quite-romance formula are a strong sense of...
A debut novel from British TV writer Wassmer (More Than Just Coincidence, 2010) set in an English seacoast town where life would be perfect if it weren’t for the murders.
Now that Charlie, the son she’s raised without a husband, has left for Kent University in Canterbury, Pearl Nolan is restless. The Whitstable Pearl, the seafood restaurant she owns and operates, doesn’t come close to absorbing all her energy. So she returns to law enforcement—not as the police officer she was before Charlie arrived but as a private investigator. After sorting out Phillip Caffery’s missing dog and refusing Doug Stroud’s request to check up on Vincent Rowe, the fisherman Stroud has loaned money to to help reseed the shrinking oyster beds, she lands a doozy of a third case when she goes to Vinnie’s boat to warn him that Stroud is on the warpath and finds her longtime friend dead in the water, an anchor chain wrapped around his ankle. DCI Mike McGuire, recently transferred from the Met to the Canterbury CID, is far from convinced that Vinnie was murdered, but the death very shortly afterward of Stroud himself offers a powerful new argument. As McGuire and Pearl debate how to parse the evidence, Pearl can’t help but notice that the conveniently widowed McGuire, who’s still grieving the fiancee he lost a year ago, is a most attractive figure of a man. Even taken together, the two don’t add up to much of a sleuthing team, and readers looking for the pleasures of an old-school whodunit are likely to find this one slow to get started and rushed at the end.
Wassmer’s main contributions to the familiar village murder-cum-not-quite-romance formula are a strong sense of atmosphere—the town is much more vivid than its individual inhabitants—and a keen eye for the places where everyday frictions between perfectly nice people shade off into something altogether darker. First of a series.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4721-1648-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Constable/Little, Brown UK
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Despite Gardner’s considerable research into the foster-care system, her plot is a tired one populated with cardboard...
The execution-style murders of a family and the disappearance of their eldest daughter once again bring together a seasoned homicide detective and a kidnap victim–turned-vigilante to find the killer.
In the Boston suburb of Brighton, it’s Detective D.D. Warren’s (Find Her, 2016, etc.) least favorite kind of crime: the slaughter of a family. Juanita Baez, her boyfriend, Charlie Boyd, her 13-year-old daughter, Lola, and her 9-year-old son, Manny, are all dead, shot to death in their home. Conspicuously absent are 16-year-old Roxanna Baez and the family’s two elderly dogs. Warren and her team weigh the possibility that Roxy was abducted or the more chilling one: that she murdered her family. Turns out Juanita wasn’t always a perfect mother; the state removed her children five years earlier due to her drinking, placing the girls in the almost Dickensian Mother Del’s foster home, where all manner of abuse went on under the radar. In a rare instance of family reunification, Juanita regained custody, but the girls’ time in foster care changed them. In an awkwardly patched-in subplot, another Gardner regular, kidnap survivor Flora Dane, who now runs a support/empowerment group of sorts for women who’ve lived through similar trauma, realizes Roxy approached her group before disappearing, making Flora determined to find her before the police do. She and D.D. enter an uneasy, and entirely preposterous, partnership, each exploring her own leads in a case that, while tragic, becomes more predictable with each supposed wrinkle and stereotypical villain.
Despite Gardner’s considerable research into the foster-care system, her plot is a tired one populated with cardboard characters and twists any savvy reader will see coming a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4205-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
Furiously suspenseful, but brain-dead second volume in Child’s gratuitously derivative Jack Reacher action series (Killing Floor, 1997). Reacher, a former Army Military Police Major, has now moved on to Chicago, where he gallantly assists a beautiful mystery woman hobbling on a crutch with her dry cleaning. Seconds later, Reacher and the woman, FBI agent Holly Johnson (also daughter of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as goddaughter of the President), are kidnaped by armed gunmen. Handcuffed together and tossed in the back of a van, the two are taken to the Montana mountain stronghold of Beau Borken, a fat, ugly, psychopathically vicious neo-Nazi militia leader given to sawing the arms off day laborers and making windy speeches about how he brilliant he is. Of course, the kidnappers don’t know that they have a former military police major in their clutches who, in addition to having a Silver Star for heroism, is one of the best snipers the Army has ever produced, can pull iron rings out of barn doors, and kill bad guys with lit cigarettes. Meanwhile, a team of FBI agents, at least one of whom is a mole leaking information to Borken, identify Reacher from a reconstructed photo taken from the dry cleaner’s surveillance camera. Borken, impressed with Reacher’s military record, lectures him about his brilliant plan to overthrow the US using a hijacked Army missile unit, with Holly held as a hostage in a specially constructed, dynamite-lined prison cell. Borken stupidly lets Reacher best him in a shooting match, then grandiosely turns his back on his captives enough times for Reacher and Holly to escape, cause havoc, get captured, escape, make love in the woods, cause more havoc, and get captured again, as General Johnson, FBI Director Harlan Webster, and General Garber, Reacher’s former commander, plan a covert strike on Borken’s fortress that’s certain to fail. Another Rogue Warrior meets Die Hard with all the typical over-the-top plotting, blood-splattering ultraviolence, lock-jawed heroics and the dumbest villains this side of Ruby Ridge.
Pub Date: July 20, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-14379-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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