A trio of interlinked horrors unfold in the days leading up to Iceland’s celebration of Christmas 1987.
Maybe the following February is too soon for Detective Hulda Hermannsdóttir to have returned to work at Reykjavík CID. Assigned to reopen the case of Unnur, a girl from Gardabaet who vanished last autumn during the tour of Iceland she undertook on foot before enrolling in college, Hulda thinks it’s the worst possible investigation she could have been handed because she’s still reeling from the darkly hinted domestic catastrophe that began with the withdrawn behavior of Dimma, her own teenager, and alienated her from her husband, Jón, over the holidays. As Hulda, who’s not “kidding herself that there would be any happy ending,” soldiers on in search of the missing Unnur, Jónasson counterpoints her inquiries with excruciatingly paced stages of a flashback to the days before Christmas, when family farmer Einar Einarsson’s wife, Erla, opens the door of their house to Leó, a lost stranger who claims to have gotten separated from other members of his hunting party. A wintry storm prevents Leó from leaving, and with every hour that passes, Erla uncovers more discrepancies in his story. Who is he really, why has he come to their isolated home, and what unspeakable plans does he have in mind?
Jónasson weaves his suspenseful tales together with remorseless logic up to a climax more nightmarish than the buildup.Pub Date: June 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-76811-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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Twenty years after Chloe Davis’ father was convicted of killing half a dozen young women, someone seems to be celebrating the anniversary by extending the list.
No one in little Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, was left untouched by Richard Davis’ confession, least of all his family members. His wife, Mona, tried to kill herself and has been incapacitated ever since. His son, Cooper, became so suspicious that even now it’s hard for him to accept pharmaceutical salesman Daniel Briggs, whose sister, Sophie, also vanished 20 years ago, as Chloe’s fiance. And Chloe’s own nightmares, which lead her to rebuff New York Times reporter Aaron Jansen, who wants to interview her for an anniversary story, are redoubled when her newest psychiatric patient, Lacey Deckler, follows the path of high school student Aubrey Gravino by disappearing and then turning up dead. The good news is that Dick Davis, whom Chloe has had no contact with ever since he was imprisoned after his confession, obviously didn’t commit these new crimes. The bad news is that someone else did, someone who knows a great deal about the earlier cases, someone who could be very close to Chloe indeed. First-timer Willingham laces her first-person narrative with a stifling sense of victimhood that extends even to the survivors and a series of climactic revelations, at least some of which are guaranteed to surprise the most hard-bitten readers.
The story is sadly familiar, the treatment claustrophobically intense.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-2508-0382-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
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BOOK REVIEW
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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