Satisfyingly doom-and-gloomy, even though many readers will balk at the last round of dark revelations and the last spasm of...
A second dose of murderous troubles that hit all too close to home for Jacksonville homicide detective Daniel Turner and his family.
Daniel’s sister Lillian isn’t the type to let things go. So when Sheneel Greene, one of her favorite students, goes missing, she asks her husband, skip tracer Johnny Bellefleur, to see if he can find her. Johnny demurs, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, for Sheneel’s already dead. Since Johnny is another one who doesn’t let things go, he asks Daniel for a peek at Sheneel’s case file, only to hit the first of many brick walls. There’s a file all right, and Daniel shows it to him, but he assures him that there's no case: Sheneel had tried to kill herself three times before, and the fourth time was presumably the charm. There’s even a convenient note in the victim’s own handwriting. Daniel doesn’t seem to care that Sheneel’s body was full of drugs that suicides rarely use or that someone’s cut off her arm with a sharp implement. Not even the death of Sheneel’s half brother, Alex, another very iffy suicide, sways him. So it falls to Johnny, still battling demons from his job bagging combat casualties for the Navy (Blue Avenue, 2014), and his sister to tie the deaths to the villainous Phelps family, whose long history of exploiting North Florida’s resources and locals provides far too many suspects—Edward the monstrous patriarch, his rapacious son, Stephen, their wives and unacknowledged children—each of whom takes a turn in the spotlight before yielding to someone who looks even guiltier. Long before the curtain comes down, Lillian won’t know who on Earth she can trust, and neither will you.
Satisfyingly doom-and-gloomy, even though many readers will balk at the last round of dark revelations and the last spasm of violence that accompanies them.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8534-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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