This invigorating mystery explores the endless ways that history shapes lives.
In this thriller, a Los Angeles Police Department detective and a university professor find themselves drawn into a conspiracy-laced series of murders.
Detective Jack Bratton’s latest case involves a body in a wood chipper. A “blood-coated splinter” gives him good reason to consult with his friend Marcus Melter, a UCLA botany professor. Unexpectedly, the investigation leads both men to a second corpse, which has ties to a chemical manufacturing company. As Jack tries piecing together the evidence, someone close to the professor winds up as a murder victim. Jack and Marcus, convinced all these homicides are connected, may have stumbled on a full-blown conspiracy. This puts the two friends in peril, as someone apparently believes they know too much. Meanwhile, various subplots, with settings ranging from the early 20th century to the present day, appear throughout the book. Most of them follow the main characters’ grandparents and fathers as their activities gradually lead them to California. Though not every subplot is immediately relevant, they all somehow link to the protagonists by the end. Ritter’s taut murder mystery doubles as a smart, engaging story of causal effect. For example, seemingly trivial things, like earthworm migration in the United States and the invention of barbed wire, sometimes become the narrative focus. But these ultimately affect significant events in the characters’ lives in surprising ways. Despite the story jumping around in different time periods and countries (for example, 1941 Denmark), Ritter makes each transition unambiguous. And while it’s a delightful narrative approach, the plot stays decidedly grim; vicious assaults and deaths come at the hands of such violent characters as an Alcatraz escapee. The author’s crisp prose shines, even in describing a hit-and-run accident: “As his sausage-like fingers clawed at the floor, he heard a terrible noise, a thud, a pop, the ring of metal, and a crumbling sound as something soft rolled under his car.”
This invigorating mystery explores the endless ways that history shapes lives.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9998960-5-1
Page Count: 239
Publisher: Pacific Street Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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