A thoughtful exploration of friendship, grief, and divine justice.
Headworth’s Christian murder mystery follows a (possibly) possessed cop.
This investigative thriller set in rural Michigan tracks police officer Paul Bennett’s attempts to unravel the murder of his best friend and mentor, Charlie Spence. Charlie is a legendary cop with a tragic past who once worked in Detroit; one night, he disappears during a shift. Paul discovers him flayed, near death, and whispering cryptic final words (“Trust no one”), and he quickly becomes entangled in a web of deception and spiritual warfare. As he investigates, Paul starts experiencing memory lapses, strange visions, and signs of a darker force at play. A posthumous letter and a CD from Charlie urge him to continue investigating. Further clues suggest that Charlie’s family was murdered by a massive drug cartel. Paul suffers from unexplained injuries and finds himself traveling to Detroit during blackouts, leading him to believe that he’s an unwilling vessel in a divine—or diabolical—mission. The line between the physical and the spiritual blurs as Paul navigates corruption, grief, and various revelations, all while protecting his family, deepening his faith, and honoring his fallen friend. Headworth’s writing is direct and immersive (though sometimes clunky), blending the tropes of procedural crime fiction with spiritual allegory. Emphasizing redemption through faith, the narrative focuses on the tension between religious tradition and the mysterious ways God acts through flawed humans. The author effectively captures the protagonist’s psychological turmoil and spiritual growth. The novel’s mix of crime drama and Christian messaging is compelling, but the story suffers from uneven pacing due to its extensive theological digressions. Still, the narrative works on a basic level as both a mystery and a meditation on faith and purpose; the supernatural elements related to Paul’s possible possession or divine empowerment add complexity to an otherwise relatively generic genre story and intensify questions about the nature of redemption and prophecy in modern times.
A thoughtful exploration of friendship, grief, and divine justice.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9781662892943
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Xulon Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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