A solid police procedural that loses its way among too many characters and subplots.
A thriller about old family secrets, bondage and murder.
Homicide detective Jack Fariel’s first case after a bout with cancer involves his high school sweetheart, her rich, psychotic husband and a string of unsolved murders. Fariel hasn’t seen Corie Markham since they were both teenagers and she caught him sleeping with her best friend. Now, Fariel has to interview Corie about the dead man, Brice Shaughnessy, in her guesthouse. After high school, Corie married Evan Markham, a wealthy legal consultant with a taste for bondage and (the reader discovers very early on) murder. Evan keeps his secret life from his wife and associates, but he luxuriates in the memories of past kills. The marriage fell apart as Corie tried to remove herself from Evan’s violent games and power trips. Corie and Brice were friends who, just before his death, were investigating the unsolved murder of Brice’s sister. Other suspects include: Evan’s current mistress; Evan’s mother, Jessie; Jessie’s painting protégé, Lennon; and Corie’s oddly unsympathetic mother, Vi. As the police begin to suspect Evan, Fariel has to balance his feelings for Corie with his focus on the case. The Fariel chapters are confidently written, and Clark paints a convincing portrait of the Denver Police Department in action. Fariel doesn’t have a futuristic crime lab or Sherlockian insights; he just does good police work that’s fun to follow. Roughly half the narrative is told from Evan point of view. His overly deliberate dialogue and movement seem aimed to chill readers with their coldness, but the effect is too stiff, and Evan becomes yet another stock psycho in a dapper suit and a fast car. Also, reveals in the first few chapters undercut the suspense. While the reader doesn’t know until the end if Evan killed Brice or why, Evan is so evil that the novel loses a great deal of tension—after all, he had to be involved somehow. Adding the sexual-bondage subplot leads to some vivid images and ruminations on power, but it’s also distracting.
A solid police procedural that loses its way among too many characters and subplots.Pub Date: March 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482512526
Page Count: 412
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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