The ending may not be a surprise, but characters enmeshed in a diligent investigation never fail to mesmerize.
Two detectives working for the FBI chase a killer choosing seemingly random victims from around the United States in this debut thriller, the first of a proposed series.
Elijah Warren, recruited by the FBI from a homicide task force, doesn’t get along with Aurelia Blanc, the bureau’s best forensic pathologist. But Director Clint Adams can’t deny that the two work well together. After they close a case in New York in early 1997, Adams makes them indefinite partners and puts them on a plane to Nashville, Indiana. There, small-town residents are shocked by the discovery of a body “melted” and cut into pieces. The detectives scrutinize the crime scene and question locals but don’t make much headway. That is, until Elijah and Aurelia both receive notes left in their hotel rooms, poetic stanzas clearly from a killer watching and toying with them. Meanwhile, in Colorado, rangers find the remains of a woman with an accompanying poem. Now pursuing a serial killer, the detectives follow a trail of victims from different states, while the now-dubbed Poetic Murderer leaves behind additional clues. In one instance, a man’s name is provided at the scene of someone else’s body, and it’s soon apparent that the killer has abducted said individual, all part of an appalling plan. Though readers will likely spot a significant clue before Elijah and Aurelia, Cady’s novel is a solid detective story thanks to a meticulous investigation. Numerous characters, for example, have input, from a medical examiner to Adams, who brags he’s found the best lead (“You’re welcome,” he adds). A slowly developing relationship between Elijah and Aurelia eases the mutual tension, and Cady fortunately keeps the light romance from overwhelming the ongoing case. Rich prose is at its most indelible when detailing perspective from the vicious “man wearing black”; vibrant descriptions are gloomy but no less fascinating, like a man who’s mentally and physically “being twisted in a barbwire blender of what made him human.” The killer coldly conversing with his victims makes him even more disturbing, telling someone his death will “help prove a point.”
The ending may not be a surprise, but characters enmeshed in a diligent investigation never fail to mesmerize.Pub Date: April 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4834-4867-1
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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