More creaky and less gripping than its sequel, Haunted Lady (1942), but still a welcome resurrection of its prolific,...
When an aged matriarch’s unloved nephew is shot to death, Inspector Patton sends for Hilda Adams to nurse the matriarch and incidentally keep her ear to the ground for clues.
Did Herbert Wynne shoot himself without leaving any gunpowder marks on his forehead? Did the gun go off accidentally? Or was he murdered? The firm that recently sold him a life insurance policy worth $100,000 would love to believe the first alternative, which would allow them to deny his estate’s claim on the money. His imperious, fading aunt, Juliet Mitchell, and everyone else who knew him—Miss Mitchell’s last surviving servants, Mary and her husband, Hugo; her attending physician, Dr. David Stewart; her lawyer, Arthur Glenn, and his secretary, Florence Lenz; and Herbert’s fiancee, Paula Brent, who seems to be in love with someone else—would rather believe the second, which would reassure them about their own safety. And of course genre fans everywhere will avidly seize on the third. “I’m no detective,” Nurse Adams tartly tells Patton, and she certainly has a point; when he finally reveals the solution to the mystery, she’s flabbergasted. But her unmistakable talent for drawing people out, overhearing revealing snatches of conversation, and stumbling on and sometimes over physical clues makes her a nondetective well worth rooting for in this reprint of a 1932 novel. As Carolyn Hart’s introduction points out, Rinehart was the founder and leading exponent of the had-I-but-known school, distinguished by the narrator’s frequent coy hints of impending doom (“sleep she did, for at least part of a night which was to be filled with horror for me”). But Nurse Adams is so levelheaded, focused, proactive, and omnicompetent in the face of mounting threats and scares that not even the moment when she’s accused of killing her patient can slow her down for long.
More creaky and less gripping than its sequel, Haunted Lady (1942), but still a welcome resurrection of its prolific, bestselling author’s only continuing detective.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61316-138-8
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Penzler Publishers
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
A top-notch psychological thriller.
In Hoag’s (The 9th Girl, 2013, etc.) latest, talented young newscaster Dana Nolan is left to navigate a psychological maze after escaping a serial killer.
While recuperating at home in Shelby Mills, Indiana, Dana meets her former high school classmates John Villante and Tim Carver. Football hero Tim is ashamed of flunking out of West Point, and now he’s a sheriff’s deputy. After Iraq and Afghanistan tours, John’s home with PTSD, "angry and bitter and dark." Dana survived abduction by serial killer Doc Holiday, but she still suffers from the gruesome attack by "the man who ruined her life, destroyed her career, shattered her sense of self, damaged her brain and her face." What binds the trio is their friend Casey Grant, who's been missing five years, perhaps also a Holiday victim, even if "[t]he odds against that kind of coincidence had to be astronomical." Hoag’s first 100 pages are a gut-wrenching dissection of the aftereffects of traumatic brain injury: Dana is plagued by "[f]ear, panic, grief, and anger" and haunted by fractured memories and nightmares. "Before Dana had believed in the inherent good in people. After Dana knew firsthand their capacity for evil." Impulsive and paranoid, Dana obsesses over linking Casey’s disappearance to Holiday, with her misfiring brain convincing her that "finding the truth about what had happened to Casey [was] her chance of redemption." But then Hoag tosses suspects into the narrative faster than Dana can count: Roger Mercer, Dana’s self-absorbed state senator stepfather; Mack Villante, who left son John with "no memories of his father that didn’t include drunkenness and cruelty"; even Hardy, the hard-bitten, cancer-stricken detective who investigated Casey’s disappearance. Tense, tightly woven, with every minor character, from Dana’s fiercely protective aunt to Mercer’s pudgy campaign chief, ratcheting up the tension, Hoag’s narrative explodes with an unexpected but believable conclusion.
A top-notch psychological thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95454-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Adams (Peach Pies and Alibis, 2013) kicks off a new series featuring strong women, a touch of romance and mysticism, and...
Four women with hidden secrets form a group to combat deceit and solve murders.
The ladies of Miracle Springs work in mysterious ways. Former librarian Nora Pennington, owner of Miracle Books, helps people deal with their troubles by recommending specific reading material. Hester Winthrop, owner and baker at the Gingerbread House, creates scones individually tailored to different people’s needs. Estella Sadler, owner of Magnolia Salon and Spa, is a high-maintenance gal with a bad reputation with men. Quiet June Dixon works at the Miracle Springs thermal pools. All are haunted by terrible events that continue to cast long shadows. The ladies’ passing acquaintance with one another deepens when Neil Parrish, a man who’d chatted with Nora and bought a scone from Hester, falls or is pushed in front of a train. After Sheriff Todd calls them in for interviews because they’d all spoken with the dead man, they confide in each other their suspicions that Parrish was murdered despite the sheriff’s ready assumption that his death was suicide. Parrish was one of the partners in Pine Ridge Properties, a new housing development going up near Mineral Springs, and June, who talked to him at the pools, said he seemed to have regrets about the project. Incensed by the way the misogynist sheriff treats them, the ladies form a secret society to investigate. When Nora expresses interest in buying a house in Pine Ridge, she’s surprised to learn that she qualifies for a loan from the local bank run by the sheriff’s brother. As the ladies investigate, another partner in the suspicious building project is killed, and Estella is arrested for his murder. Now the friends are even more determined to discover the truth.
Adams (Peach Pies and Alibis, 2013) kicks off a new series featuring strong women, a touch of romance and mysticism, and both the cunning present-day mystery and the slowly revealed secrets of the intriguing heroines’ pasts.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1237-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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