Despite the recent success of Mary Willis Walker's Under the Beetle's Cellar (p. 818) and Jeffery Deaver's A Maiden's Grave (p. 965), this interminable inquest into a similar crime—a crazed gunman's assault on a busful of schoolchildren—suggests that no suspense formula is foolproof. ``This is not, repeat not, a criminal investigation,'' forensic psychiatrist Dr. Leander Heartwood tells his unwilling partner, Special Agent Gabriel Chin, of the California Department of Justice. But their assignment—to compile a ``psychological autopsy'' that will explain why Duane Boggs opened fire on a field trip to Sutter's Mill, killing 14 of 26 mostly Asian- American students—sounds just like that, especially after evidence indicates that Boggs, who seemed incapable of planning this kind of crime anyway, had help killing himself at the scene. After a survey of Boggs's few friends, a dalliance with the KKK and the White Aryan Resistance, and a brief look at Boggs's kinky kid brother Duane Tipton, Heartwood and Chin settle on Boggs's coworker Mace Weathers as his most likely accomplice. Though Weathers, a Mormon weight-lifter who lost an eye in defending his own Asian girlfriend against a bunch of skinheads, doesn't seem to fit the profile of the coolheaded bigot they're after, Heartwood and Chin battle the clichÇs—their squabbles over turf and procedure, the frequent switches to Weathers's point of view, the reverential tone toward psychological profiling, which you'd swear had never been used by any actual or fictional detectives before—to spring a trap on Weathers, who's planning an encore with another cat's-paw. But without the uncertainty that's lost in all those closeups of Weathers, there's not much suspense, and even less originality, to their game of cat and mouse. All the size and sweep you'd expect from Caputo (Means of Escape, 1991, etc.), but hurt by his lack of familiarity with the conventions of a genre he seems to think he's invented himself. ($75,000 ad/promo budget; author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-018360-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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