It's a bitter winter in the Yorkshire town of Bradfield, where Inspector Michael Thackeray (Death by Election, 1994, etc.) confronts the murder of Linda Wright, who'd worked for the long- established real estate firm of Cheetham and Moore. Linda's body was found in her own car, which had caught on a bump near the top of a reservoir—or else it might never have been found at all. Suspicion immediately falls on a suddenly vanished Jimmy Townsend, Linda's frequent escort and a fellow employee at the company, which had lately been the object of investigation into mortgage scams. Just at this time reporter Laura Ackroyd, Thackeray's lover, has been sent to Arnedale, 20 miles away, where Townsend's dying mother and hard-bitten sheep-rancher father still live. Laura's boss, owner of the Arnedale Observer, wants Laura on the scene as the locals, headed by farmer Ray Harding and realtor Barry Moore, do battle with a pathetic band of New Age travelers camped in the hills. They're supported by Faith Lawrence and by Fergal MacKenzie, who puts out a free paper that competes with the Observer. Amid escalating rumors of farm sales and development plans, brutal attacks and killings are happening, largely ignored by the local police chief until Thackeray arrives to see justice done and to solve his own case as well. Psychologically acute, with graphic depiction of a bleak, snowbound scene, characters who are often as chilling as the place, and the tense, tortured love affair between Laura and Thackeray. Absorbing stuff.
Pub Date: Feb. 5, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15148-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
Morris, author of the Porfiry Petrovich series (The Cleansing Flames, 2011, etc.), kicks off this promising new series by...
A bold and twisted killer challenges one of New Scotland Yard's most brilliant young detectives.
March, 1914. A beautiful young rent boy named Jimmy accepts a carriage ride from a top-hatted toff despite a few details about the man he finds worrisome. The next morning, DI Silas Quinn is called to investigate a bizarre murder on the London Docks. Quinn, dubbed "Quick-fire Quinn" by the Daily Clarion, is meticulous but also a bit of a maverick. His two stolid sergeants, Inchball and Macadam, pose quite a contrast to Quinn, who started as a medical student but dropped out after his beloved doctor father committed suicide. Quinn is as socially awkward as he is professionally accomplished. He lives in a boardinghouse, devotes himself entirely to his work and is unable to converse easily on even the most casual topics. This case gives him plenty of reason to concentrate his attention. The throat of the victim was slit, and all of the blood drained from the body. His file at the local police station bears the designation, "Unidentified Sodomite." Starting from a beautiful cigarette case found on the body, Quinn probes the seamy London subculture in which wealthy and influential men buy the sexual favors of disadvantaged youth.
Morris, author of the Porfiry Petrovich series (The Cleansing Flames, 2011, etc.), kicks off this promising new series by focusing as much on the conflicted and vulnerable character of Quinn as on the crime itself. Though his prose is often too pedestrian for the sinister complexity of his tale, his sense of the historical moment is strong.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-78029-025-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Creme de la Crime
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A satisfyingly warped yarn, kissing cousins of Blue Velvet. Readers may be inclined to stay off the Tilt-a-Whirl for a while...
Great. First we have to be afraid of clowns. Now it’s the guy who runs the Ferris wheel.
Yes, clowns are scary, and so are carnies—and if you didn’t have this red light in your mind already, it’s never a good idea to climb (or ride) to great heights during a lightning storm. King (Doctor Sleep, 2013, etc.) turns in a sturdy noir, with just a little of The Shining flickering at the edges, that’s set not in the familiar confines of Maine (though his protagonist is from there) but down along the gloomy coastline of North Carolina, with places bearing such fitting names as Cape Fear and the Graveyard of the Atlantic. His heart newly broken, Devin (Dev, to pals) Jones has taken a summer job at a carnival called Joyland, run by an impossibly old man and haunted by more than a few ghosts. Dev takes a room with crusty Emmalina Shoplaw, “tall, fiftyish, flat-chested, and as pale as a frosted windowpane,” who knows a few secrets. Hell, everyone except Dev knows a few secrets, though no one’s quite put a finger on why so many young women have gone missing around Joyland. Leave it to Dev, an accidental detective, urged along by an eager Lois Lane—well, Erin Cook, anyway. As ever, King writes a lean sentence and a textured story, joining mystery to horror, always with an indignant sense of just how depraved people can be. The story is all the scarier, toward the end, not by the revelation of the bad guy but by his perfectly ordinary desires, even though Joyland is anything but an ordinary place. Even to the last page, though, the body count mounts.
A satisfyingly warped yarn, kissing cousins of Blue Velvet. Readers may be inclined to stay off the Tilt-a-Whirl for a while after diving into these pages.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-78116-264-4
Page Count: 283
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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