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 tour de force whose detective chapters pale beside its escape-from-certain-death chapters.
Game warden Mike Bowditch’s 12th adventure sends him hurtling through the Maine woods into the past, just like his first 11.
Imperious Rhodesian-born widow Mariëtte Chamberlain is convinced that the death four years ago of her father-in-law, professor Eben Chamberlain, was murder, not the accident Sgt. Marc Rivard’s investigation pronounced it after Chamberlain’s decomposing corpse was pulled from the Androscoggin River. Now that Rivard has lost his job as a warden, she requests—no, demands—that Bowditch launch his own inquiry. This can’t possibly end well, not only because Bowditch must deal with both the client from hell and a resentful ex-boss he was never close to, but because the opening scene has already made Bowditch the victim of a snowy act of sabotage that sends his Jeep plummeting into the river with him and Shadow, his companion wolf, inside. Shuttling back and forth between this calamity and the steps that led up to it, Doiron shows Bowditch dutifully questioning Arlo Burch, the last person to see Chamberlain alive, and Bruce Jewett, the hunting companion Mariëtte Chamberlain is convinced was the professor’s secret lover and killer, while alternating chapters follow him as he escapes the sinking Jeep, makes his way from the freezing river, and struggles to warm himself before he succumbs to either hypothermia or whomever ran him off the road. Just in case the past doesn’t look menacing enough, Doiron, like a dog who can’t let go of a favored bone, brings back the criminal Dow family as yet another threat.
A tour de force whose detective chapters pale beside its escape-from-certain-death chapters.Pub Date: June 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2502-3510-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
Enough surprises, complications, and deceptions for three novels and half a dozen short stories.
A third case—make that flock of cases—for Colter Shaw, who finds lost people for the reward money.
Soon after Shaw finds evidence that, shortly before his death years ago, his father, Ashton, had been on the trail of some kind of damning information the late BlackBridge Corporate Solutions researcher Amos Gahl had gotten on his employer, his long-estranged brother, Russell Shaw, interrupts his own clandestine undercover work and turns up to help Shaw find that information and bring down BlackBridge. Their enemies—BlackBridge founder and CEO Ian Helms, his fixer Ebbitt Droon, grandmotherly killer Irena Braxton, and all the company’s vast resources—are potent, but not nearly as potent as the array of switchbacks Shaw and his brother will have to negotiate as they search for the mysterious Endgame Sanction of 1906. The company’s deep-laid malfeasance is closely entangled with the schemes of BlackBridge client Jonathan Stuart Devereux, head of Banyan Tree Holdings. Along the way, Shaw finds evidence that the family of someone identified only as “SP” is slated for extermination and adds saving them to his to-do list. And undeterred by the firepower arrayed against him, he decides to take on the more traditional job of finding recovering addict Tessy Vasquez for the piddling reward her mother, undocumented, overworked Maria Vasquez, is offering, and his search naturally gets tangled up with everything else. The caseload is every bit as miscellaneous as it sounds, but Deaver spices his kitchen sink with so many red herrings, misleading clues, bait-and-switches, and double-fakes that you’ll be hard-pressed to identify that final twist.
Enough surprises, complications, and deceptions for three novels and half a dozen short stories.Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-53913-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
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