A strong start to a new mystery series with a fine sense of place.
In the first novel in Searle’s planned trilogy, two brothers—a cop and a journalist—investigate two suspicious deaths in 1984 rural Minnesota.
Boston Meade itches to return to Chicago as editor-in-chief of the major newspaper American Outlook. The divorced journalist has lately served as interim chief of small-town Minnesota newspaper the Alton County Statesman since his father, the paper’s owner and editor, died. While pursuing a bootlegging story, intern Peder Norgaard discovers the bones of the long-missing Minneapolis detective Max Kaplan. Peder digs into the mystery, and soon, his own body is found at the bottom of a ravine, and his notes have gone missing. The same day, World War II veteran Eliot Ferrall is found dead in his truck, a possible suicide—but there are no fingerprints on the gun and no blood in the cab. Suspicious as the deaths are, county sheriff Jack Meade finds no hard evidence to declare them murders. Jack, who’s biracial, was an 8-year-old orphan when Boston’s white family adopted him; he and Boston have been best friends ever since, but now they’re divided by Jack’s handling of the investigations. Boston’s hired a new editor for the paper—Ginger O’Meara, whom he dated in high school—but vows to stick around until there’s closure on Peder’s death. Meanwhile, Jack faces a charged reelection battle against white Dwayne Jager, whose slogan is “He’s one of us!” Searle delivers a page-turning mystery that tackles a host of issues, including racism, immigration, family conflicts, and job stress, and even includes a bit of romance. The author is a Minnesotan himself who was raised on a farm, and he ably manages to capture the state’s landscape (“his gaze took in the fencerows that divided southeastern Minnesota into fields of corn and soybeans, oats and pastures interspersed with groves and farmsteads”) and the pleasures of small-town life in a relatively low-tech era. The book is populated by several believable and flawed characters, and the potential suspects are likely to keep readers guessing.
A strong start to a new mystery series with a fine sense of place.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781959770442
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Calumet Editions
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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