A noteworthy, delightful tale of a deceptively complicated plan unraveling.
In Dupont’s debut thriller, miners want to hold onto gold they discover, but when others want a cut, it leads to kidnapping and death.
Mining supervisor Joe McDonald initially isn’t sure what to do with the gold vein that his son, Rod, stumbled upon in a Red Lake, Ontario, mine. But when the manager of mining company Knoxgold tells him that they’ll be cutting bonuses for workers, Joe makes a decision, and he, Rod, and Joe’s nephew, Simon, covertly extract the gold that they feel the company owes them. After Joe is injured by an accidental explosion in the mine, he’s forced to bring in Mat Montgomery, an industrial photographer and former miner. Joe must also find someone to process the ore and a buyer who won’t ask too many questions about the gold’s origins. He and his group keep mineralogist Jake Vance largely in the dark, but when Jake realizes the illegitimacy of the gold’s source, he quickly renegotiates his fee. Joe and his friends are suddenly faced with a dwindling cache and are forced to deal with a shady South American gold trader—as well as a pesky neighbor complaining of morning explosions. The group retains a firm grip on its profits, but when people end up dead and a surprise kidnapping occurs, it becomes clear that the men will be lucky just to stay alive. The novel painstakingly details the process as the original trio take out the gold, which provides a notable precursor to the ultimate collapse of the careful scheme. Joe, a widower, is smart and charming enough to make readers forget that he’s a thief. His love interest, office manager Kate Morrison, however, is a bit thin; she forgoes a payout so long as Joe supports her financially. Dupont drops in a few impressive shockers, including character deaths, none of which are murders. Some of the obstacles the group faces are refreshingly unexpected; at one point, for example, the miners must retrieve a corpse floating in open water so that its discovery won’t lead someone to a nearby stash of gold. The ending wraps up everything in a nice bow, but Dupont makes it abundantly clear that greed doesn’t lead to a happy resolution for everyone.
A noteworthy, delightful tale of a deceptively complicated plan unraveling.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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