This is as much a why-dunit as a whodunit, with the real question being whether it’s possible to heal and live with the...
Three women's lives become entwined when a newborn's skeleton is discovered beneath a bulldozed London building site, exposing secrets buried as deep as the fragile bones.
Journalist Kate Waters—who appeared in Barton’s debut, The Widow (2016), which also employed a multicharacter approach to a thorny crime—sees a throwaway mention in another paper of a baby’s bones found during a construction project and files it away as a human-interest story she could pursue. Kate isn’t the only one who’s drawn to the Building Site Baby. Book editor Emma Simmonds, whose story Barton develops the most slowly but whose payoff is worth the wait, feels her anxiety skyrocket when she sees the article, though she hides her interest from her professor husband, Paul. Former nurse Angela Irving has the most visceral reaction: she’s convinced the bones belong to her daughter, Alice, snatched in 1970 from the maternity hospital and never found despite the suspicion cast on Angela and her husband, Nick. As Kate develops the story at the Daily Post, it becomes clear that identifying the bones is only the first of many questions surrounding the case, particularly as details of Emma’s potential involvement come to light. Barton flirts with melodrama at times but pulls back and allows her characters to develop into fully realized, deeply scarred women whose wounds aren’t always visible.
This is as much a why-dunit as a whodunit, with the real question being whether it’s possible to heal and live with the truth after hiding behind a lie for so long.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-99048-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
Graphic proof, if you needed it, that “you can’t make peace with savages.”
Winslow (The Dawn Patrol, 2008, etc.) turns a drug war into staccato serio-comedy that restricts the police to supporting roles.
Ben and Chon are old buddies whose complementary styles—Ben is laid-back and mellow, Chon is a former SEAL with baditude—have made them successful partners in a Southern California drug operation. Studious Ben has developed a strain of Ultra White Widow that gets the most jaundiced users high off one toke; Chon provides security for the operation, its distributors and their baby-doll mascot Ophelia. One day, duly constituted representatives of the Baja Cartel, under the leadership of engineer Hernan Lauter’s iron-willed mother Elena, approach Ben and Chonny with an offer they can’t refuse: Sell their product to Baja at wholesale prices and turn their distribution list over to the cartel so that the gross profits from Ultra White Widow can be redirected south of the border. The lads, who’ve been looking to get out of the drug business anyway, politely decline, then rapidly change their tune when Miguel (“Lado”) Arroyo, Baja’s advance man for SoCal, has Ophelia kidnapped and threatens to execute her instead of merely holding her hostage for three years. Now Chon’s dander is up, and even Ben finds his gorge rising. Instead of accepting a demotion to Baja’s growers, they make a counteroffer—name your price for a buyout that would spring O immediately—and then have to figure out a way to come up with the $20 million Baja demands. Their happy inspiration is to liquidate all their assets and then steal the shortfall from their extortionists’ dealers and distributors. The result is a bloodbath presented in an inimitable combination of addled prose poetry and text messages (sample action prologue: “Now I’m one of them / He sights in again. / No time for / Lack of PTSD / He only hopes that / Gentle Ben / Increase-the-Peace Ben / is one of them, too, now.”).
Graphic proof, if you needed it, that “you can’t make peace with savages.”Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8336-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
Brown’s ear for Texas dialect and her earnest characterizations of cynical lawmen with stout hearts make for an enjoyable...
A manhunt for a homicidal stalker reunites an ex-cop and his long-lost daughter, in Brown’s latest thriller (Rainwater, 2009).
Private eye Dodge Hanley, who left the Houston police for Atlanta years before, is summoned back to Texas by his long-ago flame Caroline King, now a successful realtor. Caroline wants Dodge, who once rescued her from an abusive fiancé, to lend his sleuthing skills to find Oren Starks, the man who burst in on her daughter Berry and Berry’s co-worker Ben at Caroline’s lake house near the small town of Merritt. Shooting and wounding Ben, Oren fled, but not before vowing to murder Berry. A dismissed co-worker at the Houston marketing firm where Berry and Ben work, Oren was unhinged by his thwarted efforts to woo Berry and another colleague, Sally Buckland. Dodge (who, unbeknownst to Berry, is her father) and local deputy Ski Nyland join forces to track Oren down. Ski’s call to Sally finds her strangely reluctant to corroborate her previous claim of sexual harassment against Oren, perhaps because Oren has a gun to her head during the call. Despite a leg injury sustained at Caroline’s house, Oren confounds pursuers by somehow managing to be in several places at once. He breaks into a Merritt motel room, fatally wounding a teenager who surprises him there. Sally’s body is found hanging in the closet of Berry’s Houston home. Oren takes an elderly couple hostage in a campground, and kills again before disappearing into the Big Thicket, a treacherous, swampy national park. Brown’s trademark romance spiced with raunch serves her well as she orchestrates two parallel lust stories: Caroline’s and Dodge’s passionate but brief encounter in 1978, and the present frisson between Berry and Dodge’s younger doppelgänger, hard-boiled cop Ski. The narrative, slowed by too many talky scenes and descriptive filler, eventually rewards readers’ patience with a bang-up surprise ending.
Brown’s ear for Texas dialect and her earnest characterizations of cynical lawmen with stout hearts make for an enjoyable summer read.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6310-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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