by Luna Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A lightweight but punchy Nordic noir thriller.
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In Swedish author Miller’s thriller series starter set in and around Stockholm, an aging private investigator and her young team take on a seemingly simple adultery case that proves to be complex, indeed.
Nadja Franzén’s ordinarily staid husband, Mikael, has been acting strangely. He’s been staying out late at night, claiming to be working but coming home drunk, and his wife has concluded that he’s having an affair. She hires a private detective agency to investigate, and her case is assigned to investigator Gunvor Ström, a former surgeon in her mid-60s. As she pursues Mikael from bar to bar, it quickly becomes apparent that he’s involved in something altogether more sinister than garden-variety adultery. As a sexagenarian, though, Gunvor struggles to be inconspicuous at the Stockholm nightspots that Mikael frequents, so she recruits two young acquaintances to be her eyes and ears: Elin, a rather plain teenager with low self-esteem, and David, an immature dropout. The trio soon forges a plan to uncover the truth. After some bodyguards viciously attack Mikael, though, Nadja reconsiders the investigation—and things take a very dark turn when a brutal murder is broadcast live to paying customers. In Gunvor Ström, Miller, the author of the thriller Three Days in September (2016), has crafted an entertaining heroine—a modern Miss Marple with a social conscience and some impressive aikido skills. For the most part, the author also deftly handles this first installment of her new series; the storytelling, as translated from the Swedish by Isherwood, is slick, with strong dialogue, intelligent plotting, and convincing character development throughout. Things come apart a bit in the closing chapters, however, when a shift from suspense to action edges the narrative toward cliché, but this is a relatively minor flaw in an otherwise highly enjoyable read.
A lightweight but punchy Nordic noir thriller.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-73253-474-2
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Publish Authority
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Riley Sager ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 2022
A weird, wild ride.
Celebrity scandal and a haunted lake drive the narrative in this bestselling author’s latest serving of subtly ironic suspense.
Sager’s debut, Final Girls (2017), was fun and beautifully crafted. His most recent novels—Home Before Dark (2020) and Survive the Night (2021) —have been fun and a bit rickety. His new novel fits that mold. Narrator Casey Fletcher grew up watching her mother dazzle audiences, and then she became an actor herself. While she never achieves the “America’s sweetheart” status her mother enjoyed, Casey makes a career out of bit parts in movies and on TV and meatier parts onstage. Then the death of her husband sends her into an alcoholic spiral that ends with her getting fired from a Broadway play. When paparazzi document her substance abuse, her mother exiles her to the family retreat in Vermont. Casey has a dry, droll perspective that persists until circumstances overwhelm her, and if you’re getting a Carrie Fisher vibe from Casey Fletcher, that is almost certainly not an accident. Once in Vermont, she passes the time drinking bourbon and watching the former supermodel and the tech mogul who live across the lake through a pair of binoculars. Casey befriends Katherine Royce after rescuing her when she almost drowns and soon concludes that all is not well in Katherine and Tom’s marriage. Then Katherine disappears….It would be unfair to say too much about what happens next, but creepy coincidences start piling up, and eventually, Casey has to face the possibility that maybe some of the eerie legends about Lake Greene might have some truth to them. Sager certainly delivers a lot of twists, and he ventures into what is, for him, new territory. Are there some things that don’t quite add up at the end? Maybe, but asking that question does nothing but spoil a highly entertaining read.
A weird, wild ride.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18319-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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