An exciting psychic mystery best enjoyed by veterans who’ve read all the previous entries in both series.
White's second Royal Street book, a spinoff of her bestselling Tradd Street series, continues the tradition of haunted houses, evil ghosts, and fraught romances.
Nola Trenholm has recently moved from Charleston to New Orleans, and her father, author Jack Trenholm, and stepmother, Melanie, whose ability to communicate with the dead has produced many scary moments, are coming to visit soon along with her 12-year-old half siblings, Sarah and JJ. They want to see the historic haunted home Nola has recently purchased. In the meantime, she’s living in an apartment with her dog, Mardi, and Jolene McKenna, a Southern belle with many talents. Nola has a complicated relationship with old friend and current contractor Beau Ryan, whose sister Sunny, kidnapped more than 20 years ago, has just found her way back to her family. Beau hates to admit that, like his presumably dead mother, he can communicate with ghosts. He and his girlfriend, Sam, have created a podcast debunking psychics. Beau wants revenge after uncovering the truth about Sunny’s kidnapping, which was arranged by the late Antoine Broussard, whose evil deeds live on. Nola, whose new house is haunted by both Beau’s grandfather and Broussard’s malignant spirit, soon finds herself attracted to three different men: Beau; Michael Hebert, who broke her heart after starting a romance with her to help conceal his Broussard relatives’ misdeeds; and her first love, Cooper Ravenel, who’s just moved to New Orleans. Both Sunny and Sam beg her to renew her former friendship with Michael in order to infiltrate the Broussard family and get answers to some of their many questions. Nola’s sister Sarah, who has psychic abilities, helps them track down clues in what turns out to be a dangerous case that could ruin many lives.
An exciting psychic mystery best enjoyed by veterans who’ve read all the previous entries in both series.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9780593334621
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
