A crime novel that feels a bit convoluted and overwritten but still manages to tell an engrossing tale.
A man investigates his father’s mysterious disappearance in a thriller spanning three decades.
The story opens in 1961 with two seemingly unrelated incidents. A con artist is spooked when he sees someone who he thought was dead at a swanky soirée, and detective Paul Locke is kidnapped as his 7-year-old son, Andrew, watches. Ten years later, Andrew is the beneficiary of a mysterious $15,000 donation for his college education; another decade passes, and Andrew is now an FBI agent, and the events of his past affect his present as he’s dispatched to get to the bottom ofa series of unsolved disappearances in New York, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. Author McPhie does connect the threads, although it takes a good two-thirds of the novel for the story to really gain steam. A fair amount of the exposition and dialogue comes across as stilted and even clunky at times, which slows the proceedings: “Lawrence knew that the leaked information that led to Booth’s killing at the safe house had to have come from within either the Philadelphia PD or the Philadelphia FBI field office, or a spouse or close acquaintance of someone there who enticed the information.” It would have been helpful, too, if McPhie had included more backstory for his main characters. For instance, readers know that Andrew had some troubles as a young man after his father’s abduction, but they never find out exactly what they were. Nevertheless, the author clearly knows how to construct a thriller plot; the final showdown pits characters we’ve come to love against those we don’t, and the overall story will generally keep readers engaged. Although the trek takes readers down many different paths—some of which they could do without—the resolution is satisfying and even emotional.
A crime novel that feels a bit convoluted and overwritten but still manages to tell an engrossing tale.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9952877-4-7
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Canada
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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
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