Even the most ravenous appetites for more gruesome revelations about the Bosnian nightmare will be sated. Despite the weight...
A particularly horrific crime kicks off the fifth case for Detective Chief Superintendent Konrad Simonsen and the Homicide Department of the Copenhagen PD.
A shadowy man jumps from a canal bridge to a tour boat passing below, conceals himself until the time is right, then emerges from his hiding place, armed with a combat knife, and quickly kills the captain, the tour guide, and two passengers before the only other adult aboard leaps into the water even though she can’t swim. Left alone on the boat with the 16 Asian children on the tour, he strips to his bathing suit and swims away. Nor is the carnage over, for the unpiloted boat, crossing the path of another vessel unable to avoid hitting it, is cut in half, drowning most of the children. The crime would be monstrous under any circumstances, but when Simonsen’s wife and colleague, Nathalie von Rosen, aka the Countess, realizes that one of the dead is Sgt. Pauline Berg, it takes on a fiercely personal intensity. Was Pauline the killer’s primary target? Why did he choose to attack her in such a public way? What to make of the old cases to which the outrage is clearly linked when there’s every indication that telltale details of those cases were hedged, obscured, or concealed? In good time the homicide squad connects the attack to Bosnian War veteran Bjørn Lauritzen and versatile judge advocate/intelligence officer Irene Gallagher. But the resulting courtroom proceedings backfire spectacularly, with disastrous results for Simonsen (The Lake, 2017, etc.) and especially Deputy Homicide Chief Arne Pedersen, his right-hand man. A trip to Bosnia stirs up evidence of even more crimes; the corruption is so thick and pervasive, with so many heavy hitters arrayed against Homicide, that it’s something of a miracle when the case is finally closed.
Even the most ravenous appetites for more gruesome revelations about the Bosnian nightmare will be sated. Despite the weight of all this historical detail, the most powerful sequences are the very first and the very last, showing the slaughter on the canal and the final apprehension of the culprit.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63557-162-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels (Pleasantville, 2015, etc.), deserves a career breakthrough for...
What appears at first to be a double hate crime in a tiny Texas town turns out to be much more complicated—and more painful—than it seems.
With a degree from Princeton and two years of law school under his belt, Darren Mathews could have easily taken his place among the elite of African-American attorneys. Instead, he followed his uncle’s lead to become a Texas Ranger. “What is it about that damn badge?” his estranged wife, Lisa, asks. “It was never intended for you.” Darren often wonders if she’s right but nonetheless finds his badge useful “for working homicides with a racial element—murders with a particularly ugly taint.” The East Texas town of Lark is small enough to drive through “in the time it [takes] to sneeze,” but it’s big enough to have had not one, but two such murders. One of the victims is a black lawyer from Chicago, the kind of crusader-advocate Darren could have been if he’d stayed on his original path; the other is a young white woman, a local resident. Both battered bodies were found in a nearby bayou. His job already jeopardized by his role in a race-related murder case in another part of the state, Darren eases his way into Lark, where even his presence is enough to raise hackles among both the town’s white and black residents; some of the latter, especially, seem reluctant and evasive in their conversations with him. Besides their mysterious resistance, Darren also has to deal with a hostile sheriff, the white supremacist husband of the dead woman, and the dead lawyer’s moody widow, who flies into town with her own worst suspicions as to what her husband was doing down there. All the easily available facts imply some sordid business that could cause the whole town to explode. But the deeper Darren digs into the case, encountering lives steeped in his home state’s musical and social history, the more he begins to distrust his professional—and personal—instincts.
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels (Pleasantville, 2015, etc.), deserves a career breakthrough for this deftly plotted whodunit whose writing pulses throughout with a raw, blues-inflected lyricism.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-36329-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A top-notch psychological thriller.
In Hoag’s (The 9th Girl, 2013, etc.) latest, talented young newscaster Dana Nolan is left to navigate a psychological maze after escaping a serial killer.
While recuperating at home in Shelby Mills, Indiana, Dana meets her former high school classmates John Villante and Tim Carver. Football hero Tim is ashamed of flunking out of West Point, and now he’s a sheriff’s deputy. After Iraq and Afghanistan tours, John’s home with PTSD, "angry and bitter and dark." Dana survived abduction by serial killer Doc Holiday, but she still suffers from the gruesome attack by "the man who ruined her life, destroyed her career, shattered her sense of self, damaged her brain and her face." What binds the trio is their friend Casey Grant, who's been missing five years, perhaps also a Holiday victim, even if "[t]he odds against that kind of coincidence had to be astronomical." Hoag’s first 100 pages are a gut-wrenching dissection of the aftereffects of traumatic brain injury: Dana is plagued by "[f]ear, panic, grief, and anger" and haunted by fractured memories and nightmares. "Before Dana had believed in the inherent good in people. After Dana knew firsthand their capacity for evil." Impulsive and paranoid, Dana obsesses over linking Casey’s disappearance to Holiday, with her misfiring brain convincing her that "finding the truth about what had happened to Casey [was] her chance of redemption." But then Hoag tosses suspects into the narrative faster than Dana can count: Roger Mercer, Dana’s self-absorbed state senator stepfather; Mack Villante, who left son John with "no memories of his father that didn’t include drunkenness and cruelty"; even Hardy, the hard-bitten, cancer-stricken detective who investigated Casey’s disappearance. Tense, tightly woven, with every minor character, from Dana’s fiercely protective aunt to Mercer’s pudgy campaign chief, ratcheting up the tension, Hoag’s narrative explodes with an unexpected but believable conclusion.
A top-notch psychological thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95454-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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