A character-rich, sleep-depriving thriller.
A girl’s life is forever altered when her family is murdered.
Back in 2001, Colette “Coco” Weber and her family were among the very few Black residents of Avalon on California’s Santa Catalina Island. Her mother, a lawyer, and her father, a teacher at the island’s high school, had tired of commuting from the mainland. Coco was a teen looking for adventure when she came home one night to find entirely too much of it: Her parents and her brother, a football star, were all dead. Nineteen years later, Coco, at odds with her actor husband, Micah, returns to Avalon to work on the local paper owned by her college friend Maddy, where she writes offbeat obituaries. Then she learns that the man who was convicted of murdering her family is being released on new DNA evidence. Although she’s inherited her parents’ Avalon house, it’s been occupied by her aunt Gwen, who, thinking of it as her own, switches between loving and hostile. The house is a mess, but Coco, who’s liberated a valuable ring from Micah, plans to use the proceeds from its sale to fix up the place. Soon she’s receiving racist threats and offers to buy her home that make her equally furious. Slowly a pattern emerges: elderly widows who own their own homes have been found dead in unexpected places, the police writing off each case as a natural death. Only her fellow reporter and soon-to-be lover, handsome, rich Noah Bancroft, believes in Coco’s idea that a serial killer is at work. Troubled by panic attacks and her inability to discern what’s real in either past or present, Coco seeks the truth as Covid ravages California.
A character-rich, sleep-depriving thriller.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781662504150
Page Count: 428
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
