A grim page-turner filled with family secrets and violent histories.
A star detective’s wedding is interrupted by a gruesome murder in Regan’s crime thriller, the 11th in a series.
Some cases are especially hard on police detective Josie Quinn, and this is one of them. It’s bad enough discovering the body of a murdered little girl on the steps of the church in which Josie is about to get married to her beloved Lt. Noah Fraley. It’s even worse when Josie realizes she has met the victim before—she’s 12-year-old Holly Mitchell, immediately recognizable due to her distinctive white eyelashes (caused by poliosis). Josie encountered Holly three months earlier, when Holly’s mother Lorelei helped Josie put down an injured deer. Holly was not meant to be at the wedding, and her presence on the property is made even more mysterious by the way her body is laid out on the ground, dressed in her pajamas, her fanned-out hair adorned with wildflowers. Creepier still is the pinecone doll clutched in the dead girl’s hand. (“Had it not been found on the body of a dead girl, it might be comical. Instead, it only roiled the acid in Josie’s stomach.”) Josie immediately puts the wedding on hold to find Lorelei and give her the news…only to discover Lorelei, too, has been killed, shot to death in her own kitchen. Luckily, Josie locates Lorelei’s younger daughter Emily hiding in a secret compartment in the girls’ bedroom. Among the other strange evidence found in the house—including burned-up photographs in the greenhouse and the armory of guns and knives hidden in a box beneath one of the mattresses—the police discover a second pinecone doll. Emily is no use as a source of information; just as she was taught to hide, she was taught to keep her family’s secrets. Josie and Noah are committed to bringing Lorelei and Holly’s killer to justice, but the already strange case only grows stranger the deeper they get.
Regan’s crisp prose propels a swift-moving plot, which leans into the tried-and-true tropes of the genre. Here, Josie considers Lorelei’s remote property, which abuts the old farmstead-turned-resort where she planned to have her wedding: “[T]he house was still miles from the main buildings on the resort. There was no chance of anyone accidentally pulling into her driveway, as even that was well hidden. This was a well-loved sanctuary that had been turned into a small pocket of hell.” This book is the 11th in a series, and the beginning of the narrative is slightly bogged down by 10 books’ worth of convoluted relationships (there have been stolen babies, false parents, first marriages, orphaned children, and DNA tests) that need to be explained in the context of Josie’s pending nuptials. Even the backstory of how Josie knows Holly is complicated, requiring the reader to suffer through a contrived prologue. Once things get moving, however, the story progresses quickly, and the central mystery is twisty, perverse, and thoroughly compelling. New fans may not want to start with this volume, but those who love the series will undoubtedly enjoy this unsettling installment.
A grim page-turner filled with family secrets and violent histories.Pub Date: April 12, 2021
ISBN: 9781800191389
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Bookouture
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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