A timely reminder of a shameful period in American history and an addictive read with some final surprises.
Park’s gripping debut novel, an unconventional love story, unfolds in KKK–controlled Cattahatchie County, Mississippi, during a violent 1969 civil rights struggle.
Holly Lee Carter returns to her hometown to take over the family’s newspaper, which covers only white news, and finds herself in the center of family turmoil and a Klan uprising over school integration. Twenty-eight-year-old Holly had left Cattahatchie County and her family 10 years ago, studied photography, and gone to Vietnam. She returned to California paralyzed from the waist down. Now, her father has died in a mysterious automobile accident and unexpectedly left her the controlling interest in the Current-Leader as well as title to the family’s country home, Wolf’s Run. It’s a major blow to her older brother, Tom Carter, who expected to be their father’s heir and had hoped to sell the 7-decades-old paper. As Holly arrives in Cattahatchie County, accompanied by good friend and personal assistant, Eve Howard, her car is run off the road into a muddy ditch by members of the Klan. High school upperclassmen Nate Wallace and Cutter Carlucci come to the rescue. Nate and popular football star Cutter have been friends since childhood. Now each is enduring a family crisis. Their friendship will be severely tested when Holly and Cutter develop an unexpected bond. Nate is more of a secondary character—a representation of a generation angry at change but gradually wrestling with the horror of the present. Park takes a risk, assigning to Nate the task of being both first-person and omniscient third-person narrator in this complex story. It is, at times, confusing. But the author’s ability to turn a phrase, capturing, in a few words time, place and atmosphere, is a joy. Here is Nate describing the year after his brother was killed in Vietnam: “Mamma had grieved herself into the ground.” Solid character portrayals, personal melodrama, a murder mystery, and unrestrained violence propel this page-turner to its explosive conclusion.
A timely reminder of a shameful period in American history and an addictive read with some final surprises.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72833-140-9
Page Count: 482
Publisher: Desire Street Books & Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2019
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 smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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