Rest easy, Agatha: Clark (Daddy’s Gone A Hunting, 2013, etc.) can’t match your skill at spinning webs as logical as they are...
That up-to-the-minute phenomenon, reality TV, provides the basis for Clark’s most retro tale ever.
Coming off two failed projects, television producer Laurie Moran, widowed five years ago by a killer who told her 3-year-old son, “Timmy, tell your mother that she’s next. Then it’s your turn,” is hungry for a hit. She thinks she’s struck gold with Under Suspicion, a series that will reopen cold cases via interviews with the people who were on the scenes at the time, taped at the same places the bodies were found. Her first choice is obvious: The smothering 20 years ago of society hostess Betsy Bonner Powell during the night of the Graduation Gala she and her husband, hedge fund colossus Robert Nicholas Powell, threw for Betsy’s daughter Claire and her three high school buds. The criminal-reunion setup screams Agatha Christie (think Five Little Pigs or Sparkling Cyanide), but Clark adds some deliciously bitchy bickering to the proceedings once all four of the lead suspects improbably reveal their secrets and motives to an obliging blackmailer. St. Augustine realtor Regina Callari lost her father to suicide after he sunk his assets in Rob’s hedge fund. Cleveland pharmacist Alison Schaefer, married to a football player whose dream of sending her to medical school ended with his crippling by a hit-and-run driver, wonders if she killed Betsy while she was sleepwalking. Nina Craig, a failed actress eking out a living as a Hollywood extra, lives with a mother who’s driving her crazy. And Claire herself, not to be outdone, had good reason to hate both her mother and her stepfather. Will Laurie and her crew trick a confession out of one of them before the killer who’s been stalking her takes his shot?
Rest easy, Agatha: Clark (Daddy’s Gone A Hunting, 2013, etc.) can’t match your skill at spinning webs as logical as they are surprising. Along the way, however, few readers will be able to resist her creaky charm.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4906-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
Familiar thrills lashed to a razor’s edge.
A Spanish cop, incurring a crime lord’s vengeful and wholly unearned wrath, is saddled with a new partner she’s not crazy about herself.
Agreeing to take a late-night call to cover for a colleague who wants to go home to his wife and baby, Officer Cristina Sánchez Pradell, of Marviña’s Policía Local, finds herself face to face with a man she takes to be an armed intruder. Before he can identify himself as Ian Templeton, who broke into his own house after he forgot his keys, he’s startled by a dark figure behind him and fires three shots, killing Angela Fry, the pregnant girlfriend who’d returned with him. Templeton, who’s actually Jack Cleland, a British fugitive widely sought for drug trafficking and killing a cop, blames Cristina’s presence for Angela’s death and swears revenge against her whole family. That includes her husband, Antonio; their 10-year-old son, Lucas; her cancer-stricken sister, Nuri; Nuri’s husband, fellow police officer Paco; and Ana, Cristina’s deaf, blind aunt, whose role will be pivotal. Cleland’s threats ring hollow as long as he’s in custody, but on the journey to transfer him to the custody of John Mackenzie, a disgraced ex-cop on his first day as an investigator for Britain's National Crime Agency, Cleland’s underlings break him out, killing one cop and shooting Paco nonfatally so that he can relay the news to Cristina. Mackenzie, a Scot who has long-standing issues with authority figures of all kinds, is ready to take the next flight home, but Sub-Inspector Miguel López, the chief of Marviña Station, insists that he stay and help Cristina, who clearly needs all the help she can get, however antipathetic its source. As the unwilling partners track down leads to Cleland’s present whereabouts, Cleland, effortlessly outmaneuvering them, zeroes in on one soft target after another. May (I’ll Keep You Safe, 2018, etc.) keeps a few surprises in reserve but not enough to prevent you from thinking you’ve seen this all before.
Familiar thrills lashed to a razor’s edge.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78429-498-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Mobius
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
A solid sense of place, a looming sense of menace: a frequently gripping read.
Veste’s moody procedural tells the story of a pair of Liverpool detectives tracking a killer influenced by local mythology.
Louise Henderson, the investigator at the heart of this novel, is a detective with secrets. She keeps some from her partner, DS Shipley; when the book opens, she’s also grappling with moments of sudden and inexplicable terror that leave her unsure of their origin and unsettled by their impact on her. Soon, the detectives take up the case of a woman who escaped a deadly attack—and who believes it was the work of the title character, a local legend who may be a murderer, a supernatural creature, or something else entirely. Not long after that, a dead body shows up, which suggests a connection to an earlier death, but a host of loose ends hang for the detectives to piece together—and there’s also the matter of a series of flashbacks set years earlier, when a teenager vanished. How these seemingly disparate elements connect—sometimes linearly, sometimes via well-made twists—leads the novel to its conclusion. Veste’s slow-burning approach works well, sustaining the sense of general wrongness that gives the narrative so much atmosphere. There are a few heavy-handed moments here and there. “They thought they knew evil. They had no idea” is perhaps the most flagrant example; as this book is either about a serial killer or an urban legend come to life, that sense of menace is already built in to the narrative well enough. But the conclusion is largely satisfying, playing well off the dynamics Veste established over the course of the story.
A solid sense of place, a looming sense of menace: a frequently gripping read.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4926-7129-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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