The author tests her sleuths in this grim and engrossing series entry.
In this fourth volume of a series, two private investigators tangle with their own tortured pasts while hunting a serial killer.
Toronto gumshoes Samantha McNamara and Reece Hash are engaged. Reece has decided to finish law school, which has left him feeling overextended and short-tempered. When they decide to hire help for their firm, only one candidate shows up, a young man named Elijah Watson. Sam immediately distrusts his stiff movements, stilted speech, and the odd cigarette burns on his wrist. Nevertheless, Eli fixes Reece’s malfunctioning computer on the spot, so they hire him. Though Sam and Reece continue to fall out of sync emotionally, she preoccupies herself with a new case of ritualistic murder in which a University of Toronto freshman’s corpse was posed naked like a statue and his eyes were replaced with black stones. This coincides with the disappearance of college student Bart Walsh, brother of Margaret, the firm’s intern. Margaret says that Bart’s new girlfriend, Angelina “Angel” Stuart, is a rude, manipulative wild child with a questionable past. Making matters worse is the serial killer Incubus, whom Sam helped catch and place in the Millhaven Institute. He’s been writing her flattering letters to get inside her head and bring friction to Sam and Reece’s already strained relationship. In her latest outing with the two private eyes, Fraser (Red Rover, 2016, etc.) pays homage to Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter by making Incubus learned, slimy, and dangerous even behind bars. She fuels the plot with increasingly sadistic secrets, one of which props up the tension between Sam and Reece (“ignoring her was his new modus operandi, along with his grumpy demeanor and argumentative attitude”). Careful details about the murders, like the staging of victims during foul weather to ruin forensic evidence, are impressively geeky. And Fraser doesn’t let fans down during grisly flashbacks, as a warehouse fire leaves Incubus with “strands of charred hair” drooping “across one wide blue eye that stares sightless from bubbling flesh.” Though this story can be enjoyed alone, readers may want to experience the series’ natural progression.
The author tests her sleuths in this grim and engrossing series entry.Pub Date: June 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9947742-5-5
Page Count: 404
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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