A suspense tale with an engrossing plot and fun characters.
In Brote’s thriller set in 1978, a pair of newlyweds move into a home that has more secrets than they bargained for.
As the story opens, Sharon Walsh is driving to Nettlestone, New Hampshire, to move into her new home with her husband, Kip, a local morning radio DJ. When Sharon arrives at the house, she learns that it’s next door to an abandoned Cloud 9 Family Fun Park. As Sharon gets accustomed to Nettlestone, she finds some secret compartments in her home as well as a cache of provocative photos and a diary; she also discovers the house’s previous residents were a woman named Astrid and her husband, Hank Russo, who allegedly strangled her a year ago but was never charged.In addition, she finds out that her icy neighbor, Dolores, used to live there. Despite being plagued by nightmares, Sharon investigates the mysteries surrounding Astrid’s murder, which seem connected to a secret swingers’ club. Later, she meets Astrid’s twin sister, Agnes; together, the two women decode the murder victim’s collection of postcards and uncover a hidden tunnel that leads directly from the house to Cloud 9. After someone else turns up dead, Sharon races to solve the mystery with new urgency. Brote’s tale is a riveting whodunit that has the added bonus of being a period piece, complete with a music playlist. The plot offers thrilling (and sometimes delightfully blue) twists and turns, and Brote manages to give her setting additional texture with 1970s references that feels as comfortable as a faded Eagles T-shirt. This provides a wonderful contrast to the skillfully described, creepy amusement park, which features a labyrinthine house of mirrors. Still, Brote effectively takes a beat every now and again to focus on Sharon and Kip’s relationship, allowing readers to become more invested in the characters. Similarly, the prose can be striking, as in the prologue: “I was able to inhale one shaky last breath, the intoxicating fragrance of rose and jasmine on my skin mingling with the stink of stale cigarette smoke and the marshy pond outside.”
A suspense tale with an engrossing plot and fun characters.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9798987693315
Page Count: 307
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Sturdy legal thrills for readers willing to go the distance with a flawed hero in an even more flawed world.
Now that he’s won two high-profile murder cases, Alabama “billboard lawyer” Jason Rich takes on his most challenging client: himself.
When methamphetamine lord Tyson Cade is gunned down outside a grocery store moments after clerk Marcia “Dooby” Darnell spurned his latest advance, you’d think the woods would be full of suspects, from Matty Dean, the distributor who immediately seizes violent control of the Sand Mountain meth operation in Cade’s absence, to the hard-used Dooby herself. But newly appointed Marshall County Sheriff Hatty Daniels and newly reelected D.A. Aloysius Holloway “Wish” French ignore all the others to concentrate on Jason, whose two earlier brushes with Cade brought him nothing but grief, who was seen nearby and caught on camera a few minutes later, and whom Cade identified as his killer with his dying breath. Insisting against all advice on defending himself, Jason accepts an inspired suggestion as his advisory counsel: Shay Lankford, the career prosecutor Wish French defeated in the last election. After rooting around endlessly in local secrets and scandals that take a heavy toll on Jason’s allies, profiler Albert Hooper comes up with enough evidence to guarantee a mistrial. But Jason doesn’t want a new trial; he wants to win the trial he’s in, and eventually he does, though not without spending a good deal of time relitigating the painful legacies of his first two murder cases. And although this case seems designed to avoid the very possibility of a surprise ending, Bailey closes by pulling a rabbit as big as a kangaroo from his hat.
Sturdy legal thrills for readers willing to go the distance with a flawed hero in an even more flawed world.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781662516634
Page Count: 527
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
A grim theme with a compelling and complex plot.
A one-eyed boy becomes a monster’s prey in this chilling tale of missing children.
Thirteen-year-old Missouri boy Joseph “Patch” Macauley was born with one eye, so he wears an eye patch and imagines himself a pirate. In 1975, he sees a masked man assaulting a girl in the woods. He attacks the man and saves her, but the predator kidnaps him instead. Patch eventually wakes in total darkness in a cellar where a different girl secretly visits him, heard but always unseen. He learns that her name is Grace and that there have been other girls down there before. Grace paints vivid word pictures of the places she’s seen and of stories by authors like Steinbeck. “Pray and stay alive,” she whispers to Patch. Eventually he escapes, but she is nowhere to be found. Searching for Grace is the underlying thread in a complicated quest that takes unexpected turns over the years and might well bring heartbreak. Meanwhile, the bodies of three girls turn up locally, and their parents grieve. Is the town doctor responsible for their deaths? A local school photographer? Both? Patch paints an image of Grace based only on what he’d heard from her in the cellar; then come more paintings and displays in an art gallery—an implausible achievement for an untrained artist. Meanwhile, Grace may be anywhere, and he must find her whether alive or dead. By now an adult, he “pinball[s]” from state to state, meeting with “a dozen families looking for a dozen lost girls.” To sustain himself he robs banks with an unloaded flintlock, and he shares his loot with organizations that are looking for missing children. He has “reasoned the truest proof of life [is] pain,” and he vows that he will die before he quits his search. This is much more than a whodunit, though it fills that bill well. It is also a richly layered tale of love, loss, and hope.
A grim theme with a compelling and complex plot.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798874
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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