Haunting and lyrical, understated and true.
A couple mourning the death of their teenage son in a freak accident confront past secrets while facing the uncertain future of their marriage in McCluskey’s debut.
Kat and Scott are struggling to navigate a world made brittle by grief. Kat, unable to cope with most day-to-day tasks, resents the way Scott, a corporate lawyer, buries himself in work to escape the pain. When she has to accompany him to an evening event, she's shocked to discover that his new client is a rich widow who used to be one of her own best friends. It’s been 20 years since Sarah Cherrington cut a swath through the conservative Catholic school where she met and dazzled young Kat; the two were inseparable, drawn to one another as misfits despite being complete opposites. But a dramatic falling out when they were in college broke up their friendship, and they haven’t communicated since. Sarah, once a poor orphan, has realized her greatest dream: she is extraordinarily wealthy, and her business acumen and ruthless demands to get what she wants make her a desirable but demanding client for Scott. Meanwhile, Sarah reaches out to Kat, offering her a second chance at motherhood through her connection to an adoption charity. When Scott denies Kat’s request to consider adopting, the fragile shell of their marriage begins to crack. This novel raises comparisons to Gone Girl and some of the other recent stories about characters who aren’t who they seem, but McCluskey’s beautiful prose elevates it above most of them. Her descriptions of both place and people are lush: "Kat woke early, as the sun was rising and the light changing from gray to gold....The gardens, with their fine morning mist, looked enchanted. She stood still for a while, breathing it all in, until she noticed that the patio doors were open and, as she watched, Sarah, in a cream-silk shirt and loose pants, came out." In contrast, the dialogue is simple and true. Above all, this is an exploration of the cost of grief and how it isolates even those who share the same loss. But McCluskey also suggests that everyone has the capacity to find the way through this lonely darkness and reach healing on the other side.
Haunting and lyrical, understated and true.Pub Date: July 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-503-95306-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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
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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