A page-turner until it isn't, Kepler's latest becomes a case of too much too late.
Swedish detective Joona Linna is back to investigate the abductions, killings, and dismembering of teenage girls by a serial killer called Caesar.
Five years after her much-publicized abduction at age 16, Jenny Lind is found gruesomely hung to death on a public playground. Martin, a mentally frail local man, may have witnessed the crime while walking his dog, but personal traumas have left him too shaky to remember anything. Also five years ago, during an ice-fishing outing with his 16-year-old daughter, Alice, Martin survived a fall through the ice but Alice was never found. He also lost his entire family in a car accident when he was a boy and has been tormented by punishing visions of his dead brothers ever since. With Martin in and out of a psychiatric facility, his wife, Pamela, decides to adopt Mia, a troubled 17-year-old. Soon enough, Mia will be abducted by Caesar and his tattooed henchwoman, Granny, who likes to jab her girls with a knockout drug—and saw the feet off of those who try to escape. Psychiatrist Erik Maria Bark, a regular in Kepler's Killer Instinct series (of which this is the eighth installment, following Lazarus, 2018), has some tantalizing results hypnotizing Martin to get him to remember what he saw at the playground. Though the early sections of this longish thriller are tantalizing—toying with the reader with a major red herring—the book jumps the tracks with a burst of forced twists and turns and an ultraviolent, head-shaking climax.
A page-turner until it isn't, Kepler's latest becomes a case of too much too late.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-32102-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
An irresistible hook, endless intricate complications, plucked heartstrings aplenty, and an inevitably disappointing windup.
Twenty-two years after waking up in Spain fouled with the blood of his lover of five days, an unlicensed investigator sees her alive once more in this dizzying standalone mystery.
Or maybe not. There’s no indication that anyone’s seen the woman Sami Kierce knew only as Anna since their last night together, which ended when he woke up in her bed clutching a bloody knife. And although the woman who crashes No Shit, Sherlock, the class Sami’s run for wannabe investigators ever since getting bounced from the NYPD after a rooftop pursuit left his quarry dead, looks just like Anna—well, it’s been over two decades, and all the evidence points to her actually being Victoria Belmond, the daughter of self-made millionaire Archie Belmond. Victoria has her own troubled history. She vanished from a New Year’s Eve party she was co-hosting three years before Sami’s fling with Anna and wasn’t seen again, except maybe by Sami, for 11 long years. Already unsettled because Tad Grayson, who was convicted on Sami’s testimony of murdering Nicole Brett, Sami’s fiancée, has been released because the court can’t trust the testimony of a dishonored cop, Sami meets with Belmond, who offers to share some personal information with him along with $100,000 if he signs a nondisclosure agreement and then offers half a million to dig up the truth behind Victoria’s presumed kidnapping. Just what is the truth about Anna? As Sami puts it: “She was Victoria. And she was not.”
An irresistible hook, endless intricate complications, plucked heartstrings aplenty, and an inevitably disappointing windup.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781538756355
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
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