Sturdy plot elements and a multidimensional protagonist make this mystery an involving read.
Storms, secrets, and murder complicate a lawyer’s life in Alaska in the third Maeve Malloy mystery by Anchorage-based attorney Powell, the author of Hemlock Needle (2019).
Maeve Malloy is at a crossroads. She was briefly suspended from the bar after a hangover caused her to mishandle a legal case, and now that she’s free to return to practicing law, Malloy isn’t yet ready to go back to being a public defender. Bills wait for no one, however, and she takes a job as a kitchen helper at Fox Island Lodge outside Seward. Upon arriving, Malloy finds the lodge to be low on people, with just a couple of staff members and a handful of guests. The morning after a stormy night, the already small number drops by one when a murder victim is found outside. Due to the weather, the state troopers can’t reach the lodge, so Malloy steps in to bag the evidence and take witness statements. Unpleasant secrets come to light, and Malloy has to deal with vengeful parties, a hungrily bold bear, and at least one person whose sanity is very much in question. The majestic natural beauty of Alaska might seem like an unusual backdrop for a crime series in which the protagonist is an attorney, but without descending into cliché, Powell uses the setting and culture of Alaska deftly, showing the individualism and looser perspective on justice that draw people to a land still seen as a frontier by many. Malloy is a fully rounded creation: smart and careful yet struggling with alcoholism and self-doubt, she is both capable and believably flawed. The complications emerge in realistic ways so that even aspects that seem unlikely—such as having a nonpracticing attorney essentially open a police investigation—come across as natural to the narrative and not authorial contrivance. Background information is doled out steadily, and while there is a central mystery, the focus of the story is more on exploring the history of a family and those connected to it in intimate, terrible ways. This narrative thrust frees the book from the stereotypical genre constructions and allows the tale to go in directions that would be more constrained in a purely genre exercise.
Sturdy plot elements and a multidimensional protagonist make this mystery an involving read.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
A tale that’s hard to believe but easy to swallow in a single gulp.
A bear is hunting prey in Wyoming’s Bighorns. And not just any bear.
It’s bad enough that Clay Hutmacher, who manages the Double Diamond Ranch, has lost his son, Clay Jr., to a vicious attack by a grizzly bear. What’s much worse is that Clay Jr.—who’d been about to pop the question to game warden Joe Pickett’s daughter, Sheridan—is only the first of the victims over an exceptionally broad geographical area. Marshal Marvin Bertignolli is clawed and bitten to death over in Hanna. Sgt. Ryan Winner is found bleeding out north of Rawlins. Former Twelve Sleep County prosecutor Dulcie Schalk, one of two survivors of an ambush, doesn’t survive her final encounter. The four experts chosen to kill the grizzly rope Joe into their expedition, but since their quarry keeps turning up far from the last sighting, the most meaningful confrontation the Predator Attack Team has is with a pair of Mama Bears, animal rights activists who demand due process for Tisiphone, as they’ve dubbed the presumed killer. Box, who’s far too canny to leave Tisiphone alone on center stage, follows Joe’s old antagonist Dallas Cates as the ex–rodeo star is released from prison and embarks on his revenge tour, which takes him to Lee Ogburn-Russell, an inventor whose life Dallas saved, and Axel Soledad, a correspondent who shares so many enemies with Dallas that he suggests they go after them together. Franchise fans will appreciate new details about Joe’s complicated family, the obligatory high-country landscapes, and yet another corrupt law enforcer.
A tale that’s hard to believe but easy to swallow in a single gulp.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780593331347
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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