A nuanced coming-of-age tale wrapped around a tense, slow-burn mystery.
In this novel, an Australian woman confronts family traumas and long-buried secrets when she returns to her childhood home.
As a teen in Pine Creek, Australia, Sara Hamilton faces a difficult home life on her family’s cattle and sheep farm. Her father, Len, regularly berates 15-year-old Sara; her older siblings, Anne and Robbie; and their mother, Elena. The Hamilton teens try different methods of escape: Anne dreams of attending a university; Robbie starts using drugs and skipping school; and Sara develops a crush on Ryan Finch, a 17-year-old boy who works on Len’s farm. In June 1989, Sara’s 14-year-old neighbor Alec Stynes disappears from his home. Sara had wanted to befriend Alec, but her classmates said he was gay and she knew her father was homophobic. The next morning, Alec’s body is discovered in a channel near the highway. The authorities believe he was hit by a car, but the only clues are a missing shoe and a colorful coat he always wore. Ten years later, Sara’s mother asks her to return home after Len suffers a stroke. The protagonist’s homecoming coincides with the news that an ABC reporter is investigating Alec’s unsolved death (“They want to feature his death on a cold case program”). As Sara revisits her past and the circumstances surrounding the teen’s death, suspicions about the people closest to her surface. She discovers that someone may be willing to kill to keep the truth about the tragedy a secret. Roach offers a well-paced mystery that deftly moves between past and present as its protagonist navigates a traumatic childhood and the lingering effects of her neighbor’s death. The first part traces the weeks before Alec’s death, with occasional digressions about Sara’s early childhood. These sections deliver insight into Len’s volatile behavior around his wife and children and the effects of homophobia on Alec. The second half of the gripping novel is set in 1999 as Sara returns home and revisits the case. The timeline shift is abrupt but effective as it enables Roach to revisit characters and storylines through a different lens, such as Robbie’s connection to Alec.
A nuanced coming-of-age tale wrapped around a tense, slow-burn mystery.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9780645390414
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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