Nan Skillen, 35, is a crime reporter for a big Washington paper. Her short-lived marriage ended ten years ago; a longer effort at becoming a seminarian ended as well. And for many years she's been totally estranged from her doctor father, now in town to accept a major award for his work with the poor in Appalachia. Meanwhile, there's a burgeoning love affair with City Editor Tom Nichols, but at the moment all of Nan's energies are directed to a series of murders of women—all volunteers at one of the city's shelters for women, and all killed in the same grisly way. The police, with Nan's help, capture noisy, aggrieved Fred Dade, who's been pestering the shelters, searching for the wife who ran away from their West Virginia trailer park weeks ago. Then yet another killing—a male victim this time—lets Dade off the hook but triggers in Nan some long-repressed memories that lead to a grim confrontation with the murderer. The high-tension plot is enhanced by sharply etched pictures of life in the shelters and in the newspaper's city room, by many vivid characters, and by a crisp, clean, first-person style. Heidish (several well-received biographies of famous women: A Woman Called Moses, etc.) imbues her haunting story and her gutsy heroine with a rare sense of tenderness and poignancy. An impressive mystery debut by a gifted writer.
Pub Date: June 24, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-06012-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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