An engaging, contemplative whodunit that advocates for animal intelligence and human compassion.
In this mystery, Canadian detectives investigate the murder of a charismatic woman beloved by people and animals.
In a home on Lake Memphremagog in southern Quebec, 16-year-old Lucas Power wanted to be hypnotized. He enlisted Nicol Fulmar, a beautiful neighbor known for her deep connection to animals and nature, to help him defeat his fear of dark spaces. After the session, Lucas used Nicol’s upstairs washroom. Downstairs, Nicol took a sharp instrument between her shoulder blades and died. Now, Inspector Gabriel Duforêt, from the nearby town of Magog, tries to solve a murder in which the weapon has vanished and a history of orphan abuse looms over the countryside. He’s joined by Lt. Maxine LeBlanc, with whom he interviews Nicol’s neighbors and relations. Gabriel, a recovering alcoholic, must keep calm as he learns about the Cache Mission, an orphanage that not only abused children, but also misrepresented them as disabled to garner better government funding. As the case proceeds, a vibrant portrait emerges of Nicol as a protector of animals and a woman open to romantic entanglements. Numerous locals bear closer scrutiny, including lonely husband and father Wyatt Evans; Nicol’s scornful adoptive mother, Estephania; and Nicol’s potential rival, Naomi Savage. And what of the remarkable crow, cat, and octopus Nicol left behind? Harris uses nostalgia and a powerful understanding of animal minds to fashion this unique mystery. Nicol’s childhood spent exploring nature on the lake exerts a strong emotional pull in flashbacks. In one scene, she cares for a dying mouse, encompassing the narrative’s moral thrust in the line “Every creature, no matter how big or small has the same sized soul.” Mowat the crow and Casanova the octopus are playful creatures with detailed roles to perform. Gabriel, meanwhile, is the consummate gentleman, especially regarding the lovely Maxine. He befriends Father André Barberio, a local Benedictine monk, whose forthcoming nature, mystery buffs will note, stands out in the village’s hushed atmosphere of malice. Overall, the author succeeds in illustrating that human strictures on nature and society sometimes cause more harm than good.
An engaging, contemplative whodunit that advocates for animal intelligence and human compassion.Pub Date: April 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-03-914037-0
Page Count: 168
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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