A thoughtful and discomfiting look at the dark depths of human nature.
In this thriller, a Chicago psychiatrist tries to figure out why a seemingly mild-mannered middle-aged man murdered his own teenage daughter.
James Shannon is a devoutly Catholic 55-year-old without any history of violence, mental illness, or substance abuse. However, 18 months after the death of his wife of nearly 20 years, he savagely kills his 15-year-old daughter, Christina—an act that’s as inexplicable as it is brutal. Afterward, he calmly pours himself a glass of milk, puts on some music, and calls the police; he confesses his crime to authorities, then falls silent. Hal Gottlieb, a psychiatrist at the Greater Chicago Forensic Institute, examines James, but can find nothing in his history or character that would account for his sudden crime. He speaks to his family members and friends, and they all share the same opinion of his character—nothing but normality. Finally, James breaks his silence and provides a clue to his motive, saying that he killed Christina in order “to save the world from her.” Hal turns his investigative attention to Christina herself and interviews her former camp counselor and a therapist who briefly treated her. The conversations paint a disturbing portrait of a hyper-intelligent loner who was not only indifferent to the suffering of others, but also chillingly drawn to it. Meanwhile, Hal wrestles with his own domestic tumult—his 15-year-old son, Peter, is surly and withdrawn, which eventually places a considerable strain on Hal’s relationship with his wife, Sharon, Peter’s mother. Further complicating matters, he becomes friends with a historian, Cassandra Wirth, for whom he develops a romantic attraction. Goodwin (The Stephen Hawking Death Row Fan Club, 2015) seamlessly combines a psychological thriller with a philosophical meditation on the existence and meaning of evil. The plot’s suspense builds slowly, but never laboriously, as the author keeps readers tantalized, but never sated, in their thirst for the next revelation. This is a somewhat unconventional mystery, as the perpetrator of the central crime is never in question. Instead, the entire story is a quest for intent—some rational explanation for the initially inscrutable. As a result, the novel hinges on the depth of its characterizations, and on this score, Goodwin doesn’t disappoint. Both James and Hal are marvelously complicated figures—both thoroughly unspectacular in their own ways, but also grappling with the immensity of the concept of evil. Indeed, evil haunts the entire book: “Mankind has always waged a battle to keep his own worst tendencies in check. Sometimes we win this battle, although God knows we often lose it. Maybe part of how we fight the battle is to remind ourselves, over and over, about the presence of evil.” Even Hal’s friendship with Cassandra revolves around this discussion, as her academic specialty is the Holocaust, the 20th century’s grim riposte to any statement of optimism about humanity. Overall, Goodwin has crafted a searching reflection on the subject—one that’s artistically sure-footed and intellectually astute.
A thoughtful and discomfiting look at the dark depths of human nature.Pub Date: March 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9988039-1-3
Page Count: 267
Publisher: Side Street Press
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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