Another return-of-master-criminal sequel better in parts than as a whole.
A female serial killer is only the tip of the latest iceberg for DI Tom Thorne.
Richard Sumner, who’d planned to find some online “no strings nookie” while his wife was in Liverpool at a conference, ends up minus his ears and his life. Hari Reddy’s latest hookup in Clapham cuts out his tongue before killing him. Only then does a phone tip alert the coppers to the mutilated three-week-old corpse of Thomas Bristow in Hadley Wood. The murders are clearly the work of the same woman, and thanks to the panoptic surveillance apparatus of contemporary London, it’s not long before she’s identified as supermarket clerk Rebecca Driver. Only after her arrest do the twists start to come. Instead of denying her guilt, she seems to take pride in it and in her subservient direction by a man Thorne quickly decides is Stuart Nicklin, a prolific killer who escaped prison and kidnapped pathologist Phil Hendricks six years ago. When Thorne interviews Rebecca in prison, she all but laughs in his face. Nicklin, meantime, has started to assert himself in more direct and baleful ways that have Thorne scurrying to protect his girlfriend, forensic psychiatrist Melita Perera; his former partner, Helen Weeks; his current partner, DI Nicola Tanner; and of course Hendricks. But when he can’t even keep his emotions in check successfully enough to avoid threatening another officer whose complaint gets him removed from the case, how can he possibly stay one step ahead of a criminal who’s evidently spent years preparing his revenge?
Another return-of-master-criminal sequel better in parts than as a whole.Pub Date: July 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5968-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
Another disappointment from this bestselling author.
What happened to Billy Barringer?
Thirty years after the disappearance of his best friend, Ethan Marsh is back in his childhood home on Hemlock Circle. His mom and dad have just moved to Florida, and they asked Ethan to look after the place until they can sell it, but all three of them know that he needs a place to stay while he tries to get his life back on track. Given that the trauma associated with Billy’s vanishing has turned into a lasting obsession for Ethan—one that disrupts his sleep and casts a pall on his marriage—it seems unlikely that the community he went to boarding school to escape will be much of a refuge, but…sure? As it happens, the babysitter he crushed on as a kid has also come home to take care of her father. Another childhood friend is raising his own family in the house where he grew up. And a one-time bully is now a detective. All of these people were involved in the events leading up to Billy’s disappearance, and they’re all together again when new information about the case surfaces. Sager is a gimmicky author; this isn’t a slam. Horror is a gimmicky genre and, although Sager doesn’t write horror, exactly, his use of horror tropes is a distinctive element of his novels. And fans may well be ready to accept this band of sleuths or ghost hunters or potential suspects working together to solve a 30-year-old mystery. They may, however, be less forgiving of the red herrings and a complicated resolution that raises more questions than it answers. The real sin here, though, is that this book is intensely boring. Ethan Marsh might be a sympathetic character, but he’s not an interesting character, and the narrative pace is punishingly slow.
Another disappointment from this bestselling author.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9780593472378
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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