A stirring crime story with real psychological depth.
In Buell’s thriller, a cold-case inspector investigates a pattern of missing Indigenous girls in Alaska.
Dr. Bethene Dubrow, a psychologist working as a consultant in Analoon, a small village in the hinterlands of Alaska, makes an alarming discovery about female students who have gone missing over a span of years. Annie Brewster, lead inspector with the Cold Case Unit of the Alaska Investigation Bureau, and her partner, Arturo Feliz, take up the case when this information reaches them; they’re grimly certain the peculiar pattern can’t be explained by random chance. The situation is affectingly depicted by the author: rationally, “the lack of girls in three of the five village schools, other than teachers’ children, [must have been] a coincidence. It didn’t feel that way: the great mentor in the sky said there were no coincidences.” The vanishing girls are Indigenous, which adds obstacles to their inquiries, given the culturally closed world from which they come. Annie and Arturo, undaunted, doggedly chase down leads and start to uncover a grisly picture of organized human trafficking that appears to involve a school principal, Alan Prold, rumored to have had inappropriate sexual relations with young village girls. Additionally, Octavia Tallignuit, a young Indigenous girl who was reported to have been drowned by her family in 1990, mysteriously turns up dead years later.
With remarkable lucidity and great suspense, Buell unpacks this densely complicated case, in which unalloyed evil tragically intersects with youthful innocence. Her characters are just as complex as the plot—they’re tightly woven personalities, too dynamic to ignore or be fully understood. Annie is the most memorable character among the cast, a remarkably perceptive detective motivated in part by her own residual trauma from sexual assault. The author sensitively portrays a strange feature of the crimes—they’re basically perpetrated in plain sight, yet conducted with relative impunity. Without offering any simplistic or didactic commentary, Buell sketches a picture of how that can occur—how amoral people can avoid the interference of the decent. At the heart of the book is the peculiar nature of cold cases, and the ways in which they stymie the normal methods of investigation. “In cases proceeding from a missing person, the victim was the investigation. You couldn’t ‘see’ the crime. There often was no obvious evidence, in the classic sense. You were seeking a ghost. The daily habits of the victim became the path to follow, moving out in concentric relationship circles until you found someone who knew something.” The entire book is written in this manner—the prose is impressively clear and concise, as is the way in which the author’s unsentimental, even journalistic descriptions accrue a power of their own, unforced by writerly exertions. Any book that handles the abuse of children courts mawkish melodrama. Buell artfully avoids this trap, and the result is an exceedingly thoughtful and dramatically moving novel.
A stirring crime story with real psychological depth.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781737557982
Page Count: 428
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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