An involving and well-orchestrated thriller in which supernatural elements work comfortably alongside...
A psychic discovers a murder when she returns to her Midwest hometown.
“Epiphany couldn’t remember a time when they weren’t there,” O’Connor (American River: Confluence, 2018, etc.) writes about her main character in her latest novel, “the voices, the visions, the patterns of colored light that flickered around the bodies of her family and friends, the ghostly figures that came and went, appearing and disappearing, there and then gone.” Epiphany Mayall works in a spiritualist community in Watoolahatchee, Florida, and now she’s returning to her parents’ house in Mt. Eden, Ohio. She first left the town 40 years ago. Her memories of the place are conflicted—her father had called her psychic gifts “the Devil’s business”—and they grow more so as the plot advances. Epiphany is contacted by her old teacher Dr. John Bernhardt about the recent theft of a William Blake drawing from a local museum, and her parents tell her that localized earthquakes have been happening quite a lot recently, the result of a new fracking operation in the vicinity. And shortly after learning this, Epiphany receives another shock. Bernhardt has died, apparently of a heart attack—but then his ghost appears to tell her it was murder most foul. With this killing, the art theft, and the background disturbance of a shadowy fracking corporation, the elements of a solid psychic murder mystery are in place. O’Connor delivers on that promise with smooth readability throughout the tale. Epiphany quickly gathers allies, including an FBI art-crimes specialist, and enemies, some predictably connected with the fracking company and others perhaps with even deeper motives. The book’s central plot is powered by Epiphany’s personality, and the author does a seamless job of incorporating the exposition of the psychic’s sleuthing into the general narration without bogging things down. Likewise, Epiphany’s various supernatural abilities are portrayed with an appealing lack of fuss and histrionics—she’s been living with her gifts so long that readers will begin to share her comfort with the spiritual world. The result is a sure-footed, very enjoyable mystery novel.
An involving and well-orchestrated thriller in which supernatural elements work comfortably alongside ripped-from-the-headlines events.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4808-7681-1
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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