Further evidence, if any was needed, that all the author’s heroes are direct descendants of Edgar Allan Poe, whom Silvis’...
Will Sgt. Ryan DeMarco, already so traumatized in his first recorded case (Two Days Gone, 2017), ever fully rejoin the human race? Seven dead girls do their best to pull him back in.
Still haunted by the death of his friend professor Thomas Huston and his own troubled family history, DeMarco’s at the point of announcing his retirement from the Pennsylvania State Police when his lover, Trooper Jayme Matson, and his supervisor, Cmdr. Kyle Bowen, scheme to get him to take a temporary leave instead. Now that he’s got nothing to do but wrestle demons, from his estranged wife to their baby son, who was killed in a car accident, it seems as if it might be positively therapeutic for him to look into a case that swims into his ken during a visit to Jayme’s family in Aberdeen, Kentucky: the discovery four years ago of the skeletonized corpses of seven young women immured in a wall in the First Baptist Church. The victims, all African-American teenagers, had gone missing between 1998 and 2004. The local police had long given up the case, and the gruesome discovery provided no new leads they could follow. But a group of three elderly citizens calling themselves the Da Vinci Cave Irregulars think DeMarco and Jayme are just the people to solve a case that weighs as heavily on the town as DeMarco’s memories do on him. Although DeMarco quickly identifies four leading suspects—First Baptist pastor Eli Royce, former church caretaker Chad McGintey, Chad’s missing successor, Virgil Helm, and pedophile ex-teacher Aaron Henry—the investigation proceeds at a glacial pace. For every two steps forward, DeMarco takes three more steps back into his childhood abuse by his father and his continued mourning for his son. And no matter how keen his interest in the case becomes, it remains overshadowed by his fear: “I’m becoming my father.”
Further evidence, if any was needed, that all the author’s heroes are direct descendants of Edgar Allan Poe, whom Silvis’ own fictionalizations of (Disquiet Heart, 2002, etc.) successfully dramatized without exorcising.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4926-4691-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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