Surprises add to a strong, scary story filled with questionable characters.
A small-town West Virginia journalist gets mixed up with the wrong people and goes from writing obituaries to causing the need for them.
In Mallow’s thriller, news reporter Cabel Walsh says his mom meant to name him Caleb, but she was dyslexic. Yet she says her son “rebranded” himself as “Cabel” in grade school. Truth seems frequently fuzzy in this plot-driven tale about the week Cabel, roughly 10 years out of high school, reconnects with his childhood friend Troy Mason. Out of drug rehab and on the path to becoming an alcoholic, Troy vows revenge on nursing home director Adriane Knotts. She fired him for fighting with a resident. Cabel drives unemployed Troy to inquire about an “odd job” with El Oscuro—aka “The Recluse”—and his deadly associates. Rather than applying for a job, Troy offers to pay for one: the death of Mary Knotts, Adriane’s mother. Soon afterward, El Oscuro produces Mary’s obit. It’s two years old, but El Oscuro still demands payment. He says if Troy didn’t do due diligence to discover Mary was already dead, that’s his problem. It becomes Cabel’s problem, too, when Troy refuses to pay. Cabel, like Troy, becomes a target of El Oscuro and his associates. Surprisingly, the situation brings out killer instincts in once-bullied Cabel. When an injured victim curses at him, Cabel sets him on fire, saying, “Disappointing last words.” Unexpected humor punctuates this tense and often grisly series opener. Conversations are well crafted, especially those between Cabel and schoolteacher Miranda Murray, who meet frequently at a local bar. Although she refrains from drinking on a school night, when the conversation turns to political matters, she says: “Oy, now we’re into politics. I think I may go ahead and have a drink now.” A minus is that some sentences demand editing; for example: “The rugged Appalachian hills silhouetted against the darkening quintessence and soon it would dip into an unrelenting shade of black that only the unpopulated vacuum of the country could supply.”
Surprises add to a strong, scary story filled with questionable characters.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-940249-18-6
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Cressen Books LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.
The loss of her police officer father and the discovery of an abandoned car in a local lake raise chilling questions regarding a young woman’s family history.
When Hazel Sharp returns to her hometown of Mirror Lake, North Carolina, for her father’s memorial, she and the other townspeople are confronted by a challenging double whammy: As they’re grieving the loss of beloved longtime police officer Detective Perry Holt, a disturbing sight appears in the lake, whose waterline is receding because of an ongoing drought—an old, unidentifiable car, which has likely been lurking there for years. Hazel temporarily leaves her Charlotte-based building-renovation business in the capable hands of her partners and reconnects with her brothers, Caden and Gage; her Uncle Roy; her old fling and neighbor, Nico; and her schoolfriend, Jamie, now a mother and married to Caden. Tiny, relentless suspicions rise to the metaphorical surface along with that waterlogged vehicle: There have been a slew of minor break-ins; two people go missing; and then, a second abandoned car is discovered. The novel digs deeper into Hazel’s family history—her father was a widow when he married Hazel’s mother, who later left the family, absconding with money and jewels—and Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation: “Everything mattered disproportionately in a small town. Your success, but also your failure. Everyone knows might as well have been our town motto.”
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668010440
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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