Seventeen years after her sister vanished from a family estate in the Catskills, Hannah Maloney is pulled back to the place by another calamity and then finds herself buried neck-deep in crimes past and present.
While they were tweens and teens, Hannah and her older sister, Julia, spent five consecutive summers with their Aunt Fae and Uncle Stuart in Brackenhill, a neogothic castle high on a hill. They were the best times of Hannah’s young life, partly because they got her away from Wes, the alcoholic, abusive man Trina Maloney married after her husband died. But they ended horribly with Julia’s still-unexplained disappearance from the place. Now the plunging of Aunt Fae’s car from the twisting access road into a ravine has brought Hannah back to Brackenhill along with her fiance, Huck. Upon arriving, they’re greeted with the news of Fae’s death. Stuart, long stricken with cancer, clearly hasn’t long to live. Brackenhill seems to exert an unhealthy power over everyone who enters its orbit. Julia’s best friend, Ellie, vanished the year before Julia did. During one of his rare lucid moments, Stuart mutters something about an accident involving someone named Ruby. Fae’s best friend, Jinny Fekete, practices witchcraft and makes it clear that Fae did as well. And Detective Wyatt McCarran, whom both sisters were in love with during their enchanted summers, is becoming more and more convinced that Fae’s accidental death was no accident.
Link by link, Moretti hypnotically reveals “a tragic, violent daisy chain.”Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-0008-6
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
Categories: PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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A poignant story of courage, misogyny, and misused power.
In 1947, Elinor White lives in a village in Kent in a grace-and-favor house, rewarded for her service to the crown, and keeps her own counsel. A farmworkers's cottage nearby is home to the Mackie family: Jim, Rose, and little Susie, who befriends the wary Elinor. Jim comes from a family of notorious London gangsters, and when they want him to return to the fold, they'll resort to violence to convince him. In interspersed chapters we learn about the background that Elinor keeps to herself: She was a spy during both world wars. Back in 1914, in Belgium, 10-year-old Elinor, youngest daughter of a Belgian father and English mother, tries to catch a boat to England along with her mother and sister, Cecily, before the German advance, but they're too late and return to their home, now under occupation. Some time later, a mysterious woman named Isabelle approaches their mother and recruits the two girls to spy on the Germans. It's easy for schoolgirls to appear innocuous as they count the number of trains that pass by their village. The sisters are trained in sabotage and self-defense. Elinor is a natural, but Cecily is not, and when Elinor kills two German soldiers trying to rape her sister, Isabelle smuggles them out to England—where Elinor faces another war, decades later, by working with the Special Operations Executive and returning to Belgium. Now she hopes her contacts from those days will save Jim from the clutches of the Mackie family. Her wartime experiences come back to haunt her, leaving her unable to trust anyone. In the end, it’s the gangsters who tell her the truth that will shatter her world and give her hope for the future.
A tense history-based thriller filled with anguish and suspense.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780062867988
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | THRILLER | HISTORICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Lindsay Boxer faces a ton of trouble in the latest entry in Patterson and Paetro’s Women’s Murder Club series.
Senior crime reporter Cindy Thomas is writing a biography of Evan Burke, a notorious serial killer who sits in solitary confinement in San Quentin. She’s kidnapped by thugs wanting her to talk about her best friend, Lindsay Boxer, who’s an SFPD homicide detective and the story’s main character. San Francisco has a restrictive new gun law, and gun-totin’ folks everywhere have their boxer shorts in a twist. A national resistance movement has formed—Defenders of the Second—whose motto is “We will not comply.” They find it outrageous that the new law makes it illegal to own a gun that can kill 50 people with a single clip. Meanwhile, lots of bodies show up: A young girl disappears and is later found dead in a ditch, and ex-cops are found dead with their lips stapled shut and “You talk, you die” written on their foreheads. An inmate is found hanged in prison. And “a massive but unspecified load of military-style weaponry was en route from Mexico to the City by the Bay.” In a “frustrating, multipronged case,” there’s a harrowing shootout memorialized in a video showing “twenty-two of the scariest seconds” of Boxer’s life. She’s an appealing series hero with loving family and friends, but she may arrive at a crossroads where she has “to choose between my work and [my] baby girl.” The formulaic story has unmemorable writing, but it’s entertaining and well told. You probably won’t have to worry about the main characters, who have thus far survived 21 adventures. Except for the little girl, you can expect people to get what they deserve. It's relatively mild as crime novels go, but the women characters are serious, strong, and admirable.
Enjoyable storytelling by two masters of the craft.Pub Date: May 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-49937-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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