Kimball’s strength has been in putting real people in untenable situations (Mouth to Mouth, 2000, etc.). Here, the people...
Madness, murder, money, betrayal, vengeance, obsession, and a smattering of erotic set-pieces in a push-button psychological thriller.
Jake Winter arrives home at an untimely moment and catches his wife with Price Ashworth, his ex-analyst—en flagrante. Well, not quite. But they were having this candlelit dinner, Jake subsequently explains to the authorities, “with good wine and oyster-minestrone soup.” What recourse, then, but to throw a radio at the head doctor’s head, since the heartbreaking truth is that Laura, Jake’s wife, makes oyster-minestrone only when she’s in love? So there’s Jake, jailed on a felony assault charge, though not for long. To the rescue—with bail money—comes young Alix Callahan. Who, Jake’s attorney asks, is this welcome though mysterious benefactor? Good question, and one Jake is hard-pressed to answer satisfactorily. Dimly, he recalls going to college with a woman of that name, but the University of New Hampshire was 15 years ago and they were never really friends. Nor is the lady herself exactly filled with information once she’s tracked down and confronted. She’s a fan, she says, of Berth, Jake’s book about the sleeping compartment of a train, a recondite enough work not previously notable for arousing passionate support. Jake leaves his meeting with Alix bemused. His meeting with July (née Juliette Whitestone), however, is far more unsettling—July, the stunning, unmitigatedly sexy, half-American, half-Kogi (Colombian) Indian, whose beauty is only skin-deep while evil permeates her every pore. Thanks to her, Jake is involved in a disastrous incident during which Alix falls from the Piscataqua Bridge (Maine), putting Jake under suspicion of being complicit in her murder. Wanton, willful July: wicked enough to make any man desperate for August.
Kimball’s strength has been in putting real people in untenable situations (Mouth to Mouth, 2000, etc.). Here, the people are cardboard, the situations unremarkable.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-008737-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.
A young Philadelphia policewoman searches for her addicted sister on the streets.
The title of Moore’s (The Unseen World, 2016, etc.) fourth novel refers to “a long bright river of departed souls,” the souls of people dead from opioid overdoses in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington. The book opens with a long paragraph that's just a list of names, most of whom don’t have a role in the plot, but the last two entries are key: “Our mother. Our father.” As the novel opens, narrator Mickey Fitzpatrick—a bright but emotionally damaged single mom—is responding with her partner to a call. A dead girl has turned up in an abandoned train yard frequented by junkies. Mickey is terrified that it will be her estranged sister, Kacey, whom she hasn’t seen in a while. The two were raised by their grandmother, a cold, bitter woman who never recovered from the overdose death of the girls' mother. Mickey herself is awkward and tense in all social situations; when she talks about her childhood she mentions watching the other kids from the window, trying to memorize their mannerisms so she could “steal them and use them [her]self.” She is close with no one except her 4-year-old son, Thomas, whom she barely sees because she works so much, leaving him with an unenthusiastic babysitter. Opioid abuse per se is not the focus of the action—the book centers on the search for Kacey. Obsessed with the possibility that her sister will end up dead before she can find her, Mickey breaches protocol and makes a series of impulsive decisions that get her in trouble. The pace is frustratingly slow for most of the book, then picks up with a flurry of revelations and developments toward the end, bringing characters onstage we don’t have enough time to get to know. The narrator of this atmospheric crime novel has every reason to be difficult and guarded, but the reader may find her no easier to bond with than the other characters do.
With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-54067-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
These characters are so beloved that readers may not mind when a few twists veer dangerously close to the absurd.
Three Gardner fan favorites—FBI agent Kimberly Quincy, Sgt. D.D. Warren of the Boston Police, and serial-killer–survivor–turned-vigilante Flora Dane—team up to untangle a series of murders, and lots of small-town secrets, in the Georgia hills.
On a hike in the hills outside the quaint tourist town of Niche, Georgia, a couple finds the partial skeletal remains of Lilah Abenito, who went missing 15 years ago. Lilah was thought to be one of the first victims connected to Jacob Ness, who kidnapped Flora eight years ago when she was a Boston college student and held her captive, mostly in a coffin-sized box, for 472 days. The chance to link the deceased Ness to additional crimes is impossible to pass up, and FBI agent Kimberly Quincy invites D.D., Flora (who is a confidential informant for D.D.), and computer analyst Keith Edgar, Flora's friend/love interest, to be part of her task force. A search through the hills turns up a mass grave full of more skeletal remains. While D.D. is updating the mayor, Howard Counsel, and his wife, Martha, who own the charming Mountain Laurel B&B, she becomes interested in their timid, fearful maid, a young Hispanic woman who's brain damaged and unable to speak following a car accident when she was a child. When Martha suddenly hangs herself (or so it seems), D.D. realizes something very odd is going on at ye olde B&B. Gardner juggles multiple narratives, including that of the Counsels’ nameless maid, with ease. However, the involvement of two civilians in a major federal task force is initially hard to swallow, as are a few supernatural elements Gardner (Look for Me, 2018, etc.) shoehorns in. But Flora’s tentative romance with Keith and her realization that she might finally be thriving, not just surviving, are bright spots, as is Gardner’s evolving and sensitive exploration of trauma and its insidious, lasting effects.
These characters are so beloved that readers may not mind when a few twists veer dangerously close to the absurd.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4500-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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