Beautiful and chilling—a brilliant debut.
In Tomkins’ (Dynasty: Fifty Years of Shankly’s Liverpool, 2013, etc.) novel, a forensic artist’s romantic obsessions and traumatic past rise to the surface as he works on a cold case.
Patrick Clement has been tasked by authorities with reconstructing the face of a young, unknown victim named “Marina,” found murdered many years before on a pier in the English seaside resort of Brighton. With his marriage in shreds, Patrick moves into the cottage given to him by his aunt, the terminally ill Kitty. Surrounded again by memories of a tragic childhood (including a mother who committed suicide and a father who died an alcoholic), Patrick works to shed light on the identity of the mysterious woman, even as his thoughts revolve around some significant women who’ve disappeared from his own life: his mother, a young Frenchwoman he met as a teenager in London, and a troubled teenage girl that his Aunt Kitty once took in to live with them. In particular, Patrick’s thoughts drift toward a young woman called Black, with whom he spent a memorable evening at the pier and who’s haunted him since their first meeting. He tries to trace the whereabouts of Black and consults the retired policeman for whom he’s working on the reconstruction. As the reconstruction nears completion, Patrick comes nearer and nearer to the truth. Tomkins’ prose is evocative and devastating. He portrays the Brighton beach beautifully—the facile amusements and giddiness of the holiday destination as well as the darkness that lies beneath, as when Patrick recalls walking there with his father as a child after he’d been abandoned by his mother: “From a vendor beside a Punch and Judy show he bought me an ice cream, but not even its sweetness could distract from my distress…he bought me a red balloon, which, like a beaten finalist, I carried as a worthless consolation prize.” Tomkins’ painstaking descriptions of the minutiae of Patrick’s forensic artistry are remarkable for their lyricism and for the insight that they provide into Patrick’s need to impose order on chaos: “She is evolving, returning to life….She is far from finished, but to someone, somewhere, she might already be alive.”
Beautiful and chilling—a brilliant debut.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78462-104-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Matador
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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