The dilemmas of two good women struggling in very different ways to do the right thing creates suffocating suspense.
Detective Geena Brassard of the Pennsylvania State Police takes on a case that involves the most heinous springtime ritual imaginable.
Everyone in and around Bangor is unnerved when the body of legal secretary/college student Valerie Brown is pulled from Minsi Lake because she’s the third young woman who has been discovered raped and strangled at the rate of one a year. Geena is even more disturbed than everyone else because she knows that Valerie’s not the third victim but at least the fourth. Seven years ago, Janey Montgomery was attacked in a remarkably similar way but somehow survived to be interviewed by Detective Albert Eugenis, Geena’s partner and mentor. Geena pries Janey’s name out of Albert, since retired, who swears her to secrecy, and shares it with her current partner, Detective Parker Reed, whom she swears to secrecy. It doesn’t matter. Rumor swiftly spreads Janey’s name and secret far and wide. Reporters descend on her like vultures to ask, “How do you feel about being the only surviving victim of the Spring Strangler?” Janey’s psychologist, Dr. Helen Watson, begins to press her in uncomfortable ways. Fellow students and their parents lodge mounting complaints against her son, 6-year-old Christian, who’s always been difficult and may be graduating to violence. Could that be because he’s the child of Janey’s rapist, who’s graduated to serial murder?
The dilemmas of two good women struggling in very different ways to do the right thing creates suffocating suspense.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-9324-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A gripping crime yarn from one of the best.
Third in a series—after A Thin Dark Line (1997) and The Boy (2018)—featuring a pair of married detectives in Louisiana.
A body lies on the bank of a bayou, his face and hands obliterated by a shotgun blast. He has no ID. Why, police wonder, didn’t the killer use any of the countless places one might dump the body forever in the alligator-infested swamps of the south Louisiana French Triangle? Then at the local sheriff’s office, B’Lynn Fontenot makes a frantic scene because no one will look for her missing adult son. But Det. Antoinette “Annie” Broussard listens with compassion and promises to investigate the young man’s fate, for better or worse. Is he the homicide victim? DNA testing will take time. Meanwhile, Annie muses that “B’Lynn could hold onto a sliver of hope, and the thing about slivers was that they were usually painful and often left a scar.” Then a second man is reported missing, and the Partout Parish sheriff’s office gets busy. A former high school football star had become hooked on painkillers years earlier after a 350-pound kid landed on him during practice. Was it an accident? That’s part of the gripping plot that opens a window into Cajun culture. Lt. Nick Fourcade leads a division of several detectives that includes Annie, who’s his wife. She’s just returned to work after having been badly hurt on the job, and he’d like her to take it easy. But “when trouble comes calling, you are seldom out of earshot,” he says. Nick and Annie are a well-matched pair both professionally and maritally, and they are decent, loyal, and tough. Spousal abuse, drug addiction, jealousy, and revenge cloud the lives of victims and suspects alike while characters like Nick pepper their dialogue with a Cajun patois: a fool is a couillon, a runt is a pischouette. Nick is far more endearing to Annie, whom he privately calls ‘Toinette. Hoag is a terrific crime writer, but readers have had to wait long stretches to catch up with Nick and Annie: It’s been six years since book no. 2 and it was 21 years before that. Maybe Hoag will lessen the gap next time. Anyway, the ending just might make a reader’s eyes well up. C’est vrai.
A gripping crime yarn from one of the best.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781101985434
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
Enough characters, confrontations, secrets, and subplots to fill the stage of an opera house—and leave spectators from the...
After an absence of five years, Hart finds more to mine in the fertile land of the Southern gothic.
Hart returns brimming with plotlines and melodramatics. For starters, there are three emotionally and physically wounded characters. Front and center stands Elizabeth Black, a detective on the police force in an unnamed North Carolina city. Feisty, irrepressible Elizabeth has been furloughed after an incident in a cellar in which she pumped 18 bullets into two men who had bound and raped an 18-year-old girl named Channing. "Hero Cop or Angel of Death?" ask headlines, as a formal investigation into possibly excessive force looms likely. Elizabeth is also obsessed with Adrian Wall, an ex-cop in prison for the murder of Julia Strange. Black insists he’s innocent; she also suspects she loves him. And so she ignores department orders to stay away from Wall, seeking him out soon after he’s released from prison. Meanwhile, in a vivid scene that opens the book, Julia Strange’s son, Gideon, a 14-year-old whose “thoughts [run] crooked sometimes,” lights out from home and his father, “an empty man,” to shoot Wall the morning he walks free. Elizabeth, Channing, and Gideon are linked by troubled relationships with their parents, and the offsprings’ efforts to surmount the discord becomes a major theme in the book. There are, as well, other pertinent tropes—Wall’s case eventually raises issues of police corruption and prison abuse. Threaded through the steadily paced plot is a series of cross-cuts to the first-person narration of an unidentified man, a lurking bogeyman who moves, unobserved, among the other characters as he kidnaps and tortures several women. His identity is not hard to guess, and the familiarity of his scenes, however chilling, mars the plotting. A protracted action scene resolves the strands of the plot, and a touching epilogue lends a closing note of poignancy.
Enough characters, confrontations, secrets, and subplots to fill the stage of an opera house—and leave spectators from the orchestra to the balcony moved and misty-eyed.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-312-38036-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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