A supernatural crime novel, with an engaging main character, that doesn’t live up to its potential.
In Dalzell’s debut supernatural thriller, a seemingly mundane case sends British private detective Jack Bone to the mysterious town of Wolfston, England, where he stumbles into a nest of vampires.
Detective Bone is an aging former cop–turned–private eye who’s hired to find out how a woolen mill in Wolfston has remained profitable. What he finds out stuns him: The mill, owned by Silas Laughton, runs 24 hours, seven days a week—manned by humans by day and by vampires (called the Nosferatu) at night. Laughton warns Bone that the Nosferatu’s existence must remain a secret; Bone can keep his life, he says, in return for not mentioning vampires to his client. During Bone’s next case, he crosses a Russian crime gang while looking into a human-smuggling ring. When his life is threatened by two thugs, Laughton’s vampire daughter, Mina, and her vampire friend Alice come to his rescue. Although it’s never entirely clear why the Nosferatu decide to help Bone, he teams up with them to stop the smuggling operation. Unfortunately, what might have been an engaging tale is undone by story elements that strain credulity. For example, readers may find it hard to fathom that vampires would work as laborers in a woolen mill or that an English town could house so many vampires unnoticed. Also, much of the violence in Dalzell’s novel seems gratuitous; readers can understand the gruesomeness of vampire killings without play-by-plays of ripped limbs and blood-splattered faces. The novel also isn’t very scary, perhaps due to the fact that there’s little mystery behind the creatures; most of the vampires in Wolfston seem to be relatively ordinary small-town folk. That said, Dalzell’s prose is solid, and he shows a particularly good knack for the crime genre. Bone, in particular, is an intriguing protagonist with depth and character. Perhaps in his next novel, the author might leave the vampires out.
A supernatural crime novel, with an engaging main character, that doesn’t live up to its potential.Pub Date: April 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1458203137
Page Count: 300
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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