A relentlessly grim, absorbing tale about a man with little to lose.
A troubled cop’s life becomes messier when he witnesses a grisly killing and then becomes a prime suspect.
In Carey’s novel, inebriated patrolman Eddie Devlin stumbles on a murder one rainy night just north of Boston. Heading home in the storm, he sees a car with a flat tire parked near the local swamp so he stops to help. That’s when he spots a man plunging a hooked blade into a woman. Eddie fires his gun repeatedly into the attacker’s chest. But when “the uniforms” respond to Eddie’s call, they find only the cop and the dead woman. The body of the assailant, whom Eddie reportedly shot multiple times, is missing. The culprit, whom a reporter nicknames Cronus after the Greek god who carries a sickle, cannot be found either living or dead. Suspicion falls on Eddie, and he is put on departmental leave while a formal investigation takes place. Although no charges are filed, the department cuts him loose after a year. When two fresh bodies turn up in the marsh, Eddie thinks he’s being set up as a serial killer, possibly because he’s no longer one of the police’s own. In his 40s, out of work, smoking and drinking too much, and living in a near-empty apartment, Eddie becomes haunted by thoughts of Cronus and the murders. It also appears someone—someone Eddie knows—is trying to kill him. Crime victims, drunks, and the occasional cop selling drugs populate Eddie’s bleak, hardscrabble world. There is no humor and very little hope in this engrossing book that emphasizes the dreariness of life in a crime-filled town that has too “many dirty cracks” that allow “the scum to hide.” People are raped, beaten, maimed, slain, or a combination of those atrocities. Beginning in 1980 and concluding a handful of years later, the novel skillfully sets the mood of the time with references to songs and clothes of the period. The author excels at placing readers in an environment permeated with religion, barrooms, and brutality.
A relentlessly grim, absorbing tale about a man with little to lose.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-68-204982-0
Page Count: 195
Publisher: Darkstroke Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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