A fun escapist read with engaging characters and intriguing historical morsels; a solid series addition.
A ghost haunts the woods outside Lemont, Illinois, in this third installment of a mystery series.
Billy Nokoy, a 20-something Native American, knows he is considered a loser, but now he also thinks he must be going crazy. He seems to have the power to cause lightning bolt–style destruction. There is only one person who might be able to help him understand what happened at Mount Forest Island—Cora Tozzi. Grandmotherly Cora was there the day Billy’s mysterious force was released. Meanwhile, Valerie Pawlik, who was permanently blinded in an automobile accident two years ago, also faces a crossroads. She has mastered navigating without her eyesight, but her brother and sister-in-law want her to move out of their home. Divorced, without a job, the mother of an 11-year-old daughter living in California, and just about out of savings, Valerie is stuck in place. According to her psychological counselor, Father McGrath, she needs to make friends, never her strong suit, and to confront her unresolved emotional baggage—her mother abandoned the family when Valerie was 13 and she never saw her again. Father McGrath recommends she seek help from Cora, with whom she had a bitter fight just before her car crash. Everything is in place for Camalliere’s special sauce, a mixture of present-day drama, history, and unexplained phenomena—plus, of course, a ghost, in this case one who is a bit confused but determined to exact revenge. From the 1920s until the early ’40s, Mount Forest Island was home to a golf course and clubhouse used by Al Capone and his friends as well as a farmhouse with mob connections. The structures were torn down decades ago, but left behind, apparently, was some unfinished personal business. Billy’s and Valerie’s quests begin to converge when he becomes the reluctant mystical conduit between past and present. He alone sees the once-abandoned, now nonexistent structures, and only he interacts with the very talkative spirit. The author supplements genealogical research and supernatural meddling with satisfying, well-paced action scenes.
A fun escapist read with engaging characters and intriguing historical morsels; a solid series addition.Pub Date: March 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-937484-72-9
Page Count: 359
Publisher: Amika Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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