Full of ghosts and gore, sure, but only a good read for the gullible.
A debut novel about a small town’s murderous secrets and the woman who leads to their unraveling.
Kate Russell abandoned her past to start anew in idyllic Carystown. Just when she thinks she’s escaped, the ghost of Isabella Moon, a girl whose murder two years earlier remains unsolved, brings Kate to Isabella’s grave. The discovery leads Kate deep into Carystown’s secrets, while her own dangerous past threatens to overtake her. The otherworldly elements, namely Isabella’s ghost, make for a poorly told campfire tale. The dead-of-the-night ghost scenes are clichéd, lacking the thrill and chill of a successful murder mystery. As a whole, the novel is more plot-driven than character-driven, and even then it’s no page-turner until another, more brutal murder occurs—this time involving someone close to Kate. Benedict tackles the gruesome and the disturbing without hesitation; however, Kate never takes shape, morphing from scared and meek to strong and vengeful without ever developing a personality. The most engaging scenes are Kate’s flashbacks that unfold alongside the present story as both become increasingly sordid. Throughout, the text fails to provide motivation for Kate’s actions, damaging the story’s credibility. The same frustration occurs with Sheriff Bill Delaney. Presented as a major figure, he battles feelings of lust for and suspicion of Kate, as well as pressures to unravel the town’s web of sex, drugs and violence. But insight into his character is erratic and the Kate-Sheriff relationship is neglected. Stock characters make up the rest of the ensemble: the wealthy, aging matriarch and her spoiled son, the drug-and-sex-addicted vixen, the wise, retired schoolteacher, the irreverent hippie, etc. The various ways in which they are involved becomes tiresome, and the conclusion lacks pay off.
Full of ghosts and gore, sure, but only a good read for the gullible.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-345-49767-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Chavez delivers a fraught if flawed page-turner that attempts too many twists.
A good Samaritan incurs a psychopath’s wrath in this debut thriller.
Veterinarian Cassie Larkin is heading home after a 12-hour shift when someone darts in front of her car, causing her to dump her energy drink. As she pulls over to mop up the mess, her headlights illuminate a couple having a physical altercation. Cassie calls 911, but before help arrives, the man tosses the woman down an embankment. Ignoring the dispatcher’s instructions, Cassie exits the vehicle and intervenes, preventing the now-unconscious woman’s murder. With sirens wailing in the distance, the man warns Cassie: “Let her die, and I’ll let you live.” He then scrambles back to the road and flees in Cassie’s van. Using mug shots, Cassie identifies the thief and would-be killer as Carver Sweet, who is wanted for poisoning his wife. The Santa Rosa police assure Cassie of her safety, but the next evening, her husband, Sam, vanishes while trick-or-treating with their 6-year-old daughter, Audrey. Hours later, he sends texts apologizing and confessing to an affair, but although it’s true that Sam and Cassie have been fighting, she suspects foul play—particularly given the previous night’s events. Cassie files a report with the cops, but they dismiss her concerns, leaving Cassie to investigate on her own. After a convoluted start, Chavez embarks on a paranoia-fueled thrill ride, escalating the stakes while exploiting readers’ darkest domestic fears. The far-fetched plot lacks cohesion and relies too heavily on coincidence to be fully satisfying, but the reader will be invested in learning the Larkin family’s fate through to the too-pat conclusion.
Chavez delivers a fraught if flawed page-turner that attempts too many twists.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293617-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by...
Almost as frustrating as it is commanding, McCarthy’s ninth (and first since the completion of his Border Trilogy: Cities of the Plain, 1998, etc.) is a formidable display of stunningly written scenes that don’t quite cohere into a fully satisfying narrative.
It’s a bleak chronicle of murder, revenge and implacable fate pocked with numerous echoes of McCarthy’s great Blood Meridian (1985). Here, the story’s set in 1980 in southern Texas near the Mexican border, where aging Sheriff Bell, a decorated WWII veteran, broods heroically over the territory he’s sworn to protect, while—in a superb, sorrowful monologue—acknowledging the omnipresence of ineradicable evil all around him. Then the focus trains itself on Vietnam vet Llewellyn Moss, a hunter who stumbles upon several dead bodies, a stash of Mexican heroin and more than $2 million in cash that he absconds with. The tale then leaps among the hunted (Moss), an escaped killer (Anton Chigurh), whose crimes include double-crossing the drug cartel from which the money was taken, the Army Special Forces freelancer (Carson Wells) hired by druglords and—in dogged pursuit of all the horrors spawned by their several interactions—the intrepid, however flawed and guilty, stoical Sheriff Bell: perhaps the most fully human and sympathetic character McCarthy has ever created. The justly praised near-biblical style, an artful fusion of brisk declarative sentences and vivid, simple images, confers horrific intensity on the escalating violence and chaos, while precisely dramatizing the sense of nemesis that pursues and punishes McCarthy’s characters (scorpions in a sealed bottle). But this eloquent melodrama is seriously weakened by its insufficiently varied reiterated message: “if you were Satan . . . tryin to bring the human race to its knees, what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”
Magnificent writing, nonetheless, makes the best case yet for putting McCarthy on a pedestal just below the one occupied by William Faulkner.Pub Date: July 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40677-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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