by Mark Billingham ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 4, 2020
Not as original or unsparing as Their Little Secret (2019) but expertly grueling in its more conventional way.
DI Tom Thorne’s 17th case, an agonizingly focused kidnapping, is a prequel to his first 16.
It's 1996. John Major maintains erratic control as prime minister, Britain prepares to host the national football (i.e., soccer) championships, and Maria Ashton takes her eyes off her 7-year-old son, Josh, and his best friend, Kieron Coyne, during the few minutes Catrin Coyne has left them to use the facilities in a London park. When she goes looking for the two boys, Kieron has vanished. His disappearance sets in motion the wheels of justice, or at least aspirational justice, in the form of DS Tom Thorne; his dislikable boss, DI Gordon Boyle; and the members of the Major Incident Pool. There’s no way Kieron could have been kidnapped by his father, Billy Coyne, who’s serving a sentence in Whitehill Prison for assault and attempted murder. In the absence of such an obvious target, the unsupported account of a single witness, housing project manager Felix Barratt, leads Thorne to suspect, and Boyle to more than suspect, Cat’s peculiar neighbor Grantleigh Figgis. By the time the alibi Figgis claims has been confirmed, he’s already been murdered, and so has Dean Meade, the smarmy store manager who turns out to be Kieron’s biological father. So who is the man who’s holding Kieron prisoner, and how much tighter can Billingham turn the screws before his climactic twist?
Not as original or unsparing as Their Little Secret (2019) but expertly grueling in its more conventional way.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4946-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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by Benjamin Stevenson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 17, 2023
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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