An enthralling and unnerving probe into the complex mind of a murderer.
In this thriller, a desperate author agrees to write the story of an enigmatic, self-professed serial killer.
Rick Philips’ days of being a famous author may be behind him. It’s been more than a decade since he released the bestselling Shelter in Place, in which he recounts his experience as the sole survivor of a high school shooting. He now teaches writing at Dupont University. But the college’s dean implies that if Rick doesn’t soon produce something substantial, he’ll lose his job. As it happens, Rick has already found a topic for his next book: a female serial killer. Or rather, she found him. He and Harriet Bristol Wheeler met recently at a writers’ conference, where she admitted she is a serial murderer and told him she wants him to tell her story. He complies and begins regularly interviewing Harriet. She says she’s killed 12 individuals but insists they aren’t victims, as they were all “bad people.” To allay any doubts Rick may have, Harriet takes him to a dumped body that she later IDs. Beyond that, she’s predominantly evasive: She reveals her history but only gradually names the others she’s murdered. Rick doesn’t immediately see the danger in his frequent proximity to a serial killer, but his life has been in turmoil for years, as he drinks excessively and has nightmares of Ian Maynard Abbot, the school shooter who nearly killed him. It may not be long before Harriet, who’s both clever and unpredictable, becomes the “monster” Rick fears the most. Peters’ (The Complete Collection of Short Stories, 2019, etc.) evenly paced novel is a riveting look at a serial killer, even if only in glimpses. Despite Harriet’s openness in detailing certain murders, she’s shrouded in mystery. Harriet isn’t her real name, and she cryptically tells Rick that, while she’s killed some, others have “just happened to die around” her. Rick also has a somewhat murky background. But this slowly comes to light through interactions with two strong female characters: Paige Turner, his first ex-wife, with whom he’s still on good terms; and Samantha Taylor, a neighbor, Dupont graduate student, and potential love interest. Though Rick and Harriet often assert that she’s a cunning murderer who doesn’t fit serial killer profiles, it’s not clear how she’s eluded detection for so long. For example, most scenes show Harriet killing someone with little to no planning and no indication she took precautions to avoid leaving evidence behind. Still, Harriet is an endlessly intriguing character. Rick sometimes sees “coldness” in her eyes or lack of emotion, but she easily charms people. What she’s thinking or feeling is nearly impossible to determine, and readers may wonder how much of what she’s relaying to Rick is true. The author generates a modicum of sympathy for Harriet, who supposedly has an inoperable brain lesion and a daughter whom someone took from her. Rick, meanwhile, makes a disturbing request of Harriet, which plays out in a twisty final act and open ending.
An enthralling and unnerving probe into the complex mind of a murderer.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73308-831-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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