A compulsively readable mystery and character study.
In Bokat’s thriller, a troubled woman becomes entangled in a mystery during an island trip.
Natalie Greene, a 41-year-old food photographer, brings a lot of emotional baggage with her to the Cayman Islands, where her “powerhouse” stepsister, Isabel, a famous self-help guru, is the featured speaker at an upcoming Happiness Conference. Natalie’s stepfather recently died, and she’s haunted by a car crash nearly three decades ago that killed her mother. In addition, her husband has left her for another woman. The physical damage from the accident has healed except for the effects of a brain injury that erased much of her memory of the tragic incident. In the Caymans, she’s involved in another car accident at night; a strange man at the scene tells her and her stepsister that their vehicle hit a dog that then ran away. The next day, though, Natalie finds that her bumper, which had been spotted with blood, is now mysteriously clean. The mystery deepens when, upon her return to her home in Boston, she receives an anonymous email that reads, “You were lied to about that night. Have you asked your sister about the blood on the car? The guy who was there knows.” She soon meets Jeremy Sonnenberg, an investigative reporter writing a book about the happiness movement, and he helps her unravel a decades-old mystery. Bokat is an evocative wordsmith—as when she describes “sadness coating [Natalie] like oil”—and she has crafted a sympathetic heroine as her main character. Over the course of the novel, the author presents a psychologically nuanced portrait of a woman whose family regards her as “the sensitive one”; for example, when sparks fly between Natalie and Jeremy, she immediately wonders “if he was just another man who would disappoint her.” The book also reveals Natalie’s struggle not to be defined by her childhood trauma. Readers follow the protagonist as she works to untangle “a constrictor knot of lies” and wonders if she can have faith in people she’s always trusted.
A compulsively readable mystery and character study.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64742-057-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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