A welcome mix of familiar yet complex characters and a deadly mystery to solve.
Locander’s police procedural centers around a train wreck in West Virginia.
Frank Campbell, aged 65, has seen better days. Frank works in a railyard in Granite Point, West Virginia. He is easily aggravated, walks with a limp, drinks too much, and doesn’t get along particularly well with his son, Kevin. At the beginning of the story, his friend and colleague, Tom Ryder, is about to retire. Tom is a few years older than Frank, though he is in much better condition…or so it seems. Soon after Tom retires, Frank finds his friend’s body. Tom apparently shot himself with an automatic pistol. As disconcerting as Tom’s death is, there are more shocking events to follow. Not long after Tom’s suicide, nine people are killed when a passenger train called the Allegheny Limited crashes. It is noted that “The Allegheny Limited had not jumped the rails. It was as if the rails disappeared beneath it.” Could someone have sabotaged the tracks? Enter investigator Andrea “Andy” Mayland. This is not the first train accident that Andy has looked into, but this case has a number of peculiarities. For one, a local boy with autism named Beau was found injured but alive amid the wreckage. Beau is known for his love of trains and he likes nothing more than recording them on video; could he be involved in the derailing? Another possible suspect is the rage-filled and self-loathing Frank. He is prone to drunken outbursts, but could he really be responsible for the deaths of so many innocent people?
The author takes time to populate Granite Point with memorable characters. (It may be a tough place, but the residents have engaging personalities.) Kevin Campbell has his beloved hot rod, a “an auto cinema-worthy of George Lucas’s American Graffiti.” Kevin’s wife, Trisha, is a former barrel racer who is thrilled when she welcomes a new horse into her life. Although Trisha did not buy the horse, Kevin sarcastically names it “Bankruptcy” and recalls how, when the couple previously owned a horse, it had “nearly pushed them over the cliff and into the Valley of Fiscal Destitution.” Frank refers to an old woman in town that he strongly dislikes as “Josef Stalin in support hose!” Such humanizing details elevate the story above a dry procedural. The investigation itself leads to some obvious moments; Andy explains to Kevin, “When something like this happens, we look at everything,” including whether the train wreck was intentional. Kevin warns Andy that she needs to be careful in her questioning—otherwise, “[She] might find doors that won’t open when [she] come[s] knocking.” One would assume that an investigator would need to look at all of the possible causes for such an accident and that an investigator would know to be careful in their questioning. None of this is sufficient to derail the story; at one point, the local sheriff asks Kevin point blank, “Well, how’s about the Allegheny Limited? What’s your take? You think it was an accident?” The reader, drawn in by the distinctive characters, will want to find out.
A welcome mix of familiar yet complex characters and a deadly mystery to solve.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781960865359
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Christmas Lake Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 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
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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