Unremittingly bleak—provokes a reaction but ultimately feels hollow.
McCabe, never afraid to explore the grimmest parts of small-town Ireland, tugs the reader into an especially troubling portion of it in this novel about violation and madness.
In the early 1980s Redmond Hatch was a young man with a wife, a daughter and a steady job as a reporter at a small Irish newspaper. On assignment to cover old-fashioned ways in his hometown, he meets Ned Strange, an elderly fiddler who appears to have all the salt-of-the-earth traits that make for great feature copy. But horrific things come out of Ned’s mouth once he’s had a few—alarming suggestions about the misdeeds that Redmond’s father and uncle committed, along with jeremiads about the infidelities Ned’s wife committed, and how Ned punished her for them. Later, in London, Redmond’s career sputters and his increasingly violent temper drives his wife and child away; once he reads in the paper that Ned has died in prison, where he was sent after raping and killing a young boy, he’s off the rails. McCabe (Call Me the Breeze, 2003, etc.) deliberately makes it difficult to discern what’s fact and fiction in Redmond’s narrative, the better to evoke the mental instability that seems to swallow him whole; Redmond meets Ned in his dreams, plots to kidnap his daughter, becomes an acclaimed TV documentary director, remarries and repeatedly changes his identity. Or so he says—it becomes clear that Redmond both suffered and inflicted more damage than he initially let on. A few recurring sensory details anchor the story, like the taste of chocolate or a dampness in the air; John Martyn’s gentle folk song “May You Never” always seems to be playing, and it’s an ominous dirge by the time McCabe’s done with it. But those literary feints don’t keep the book from ultimately feeling like the deluded rants the novel’s supposed to transcend—and by the closing pages, McCabe seems to be going for shock effect.
Unremittingly bleak—provokes a reaction but ultimately feels hollow.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-59691-163-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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