A fun and compelling time-travel thriller.
In this time-travel sequel, a man gets another chance to save his wife’s life.
Three years ago, Nick Quinn was given a once-in-a-lifetime chance to save his wife, Julia, from certain death, a nightmarish time-traveling experience that only he remembers. But now it happens again as he witnesses his beloved Julia—and many others—die after a horrific terrorist attack during the Fourth of July weekend celebrations. As the bodies pile up, a dying friend hands him the antique pocket watch that doubles as a time-traveling gadget, and Nick has a new shot at saving Julia and preventing a terrible disaster from happening. But just like before, the time-traveling rules are less than straightforward. Nick has only 12 hours to fix things, but in reverse and one hour at a time. There are no do-overs once the watch stops after the 12-hour period. As Nick desperately attempts to save Julia over and over again, hour after hour, events spiral out of control, and it soon becomes clear that there is more at stake than his wife’s life. There’s a sinister plot that could engender worldwide political consequences. Nick discovers that there is a second watch and another time traveler following in his tracks, but whether he is friend or foe remains to be seen. This stand-alone sequel to Doetsch’s The 13th Hour (2015) is a time-travel thriller told in reverse, starting with the final chapter and going backward. As the story progresses (or rather, regresses), the taut, well-conceived plot unravels and reforms with twisty surprises and elements of politics, revenge, and Machiavellian villainy. While the time-traveling mechanism remains entirely unexplained and Nick often comes across as a one-note character (“Please help me save my wife”), the story truly excels with its engaging, nonstop pursuit of the truth. No one can be trusted in this genuinely intriguing whodunit. The narrative hops between Nick and Julia as well as a few other characters whose importance to the story varies depending on the roles they ultimately play.
A fun and compelling time-travel thriller.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63758-306-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Permuted Press
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.
The loss of her police officer father and the discovery of an abandoned car in a local lake raise chilling questions regarding a young woman’s family history.
When Hazel Sharp returns to her hometown of Mirror Lake, North Carolina, for her father’s memorial, she and the other townspeople are confronted by a challenging double whammy: As they’re grieving the loss of beloved longtime police officer Detective Perry Holt, a disturbing sight appears in the lake, whose waterline is receding because of an ongoing drought—an old, unidentifiable car, which has likely been lurking there for years. Hazel temporarily leaves her Charlotte-based building-renovation business in the capable hands of her partners and reconnects with her brothers, Caden and Gage; her Uncle Roy; her old fling and neighbor, Nico; and her schoolfriend, Jamie, now a mother and married to Caden. Tiny, relentless suspicions rise to the metaphorical surface along with that waterlogged vehicle: There have been a slew of minor break-ins; two people go missing; and then, a second abandoned car is discovered. The novel digs deeper into Hazel’s family history—her father was a widow when he married Hazel’s mother, who later left the family, absconding with money and jewels—and Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation: “Everything mattered disproportionately in a small town. Your success, but also your failure. Everyone knows might as well have been our town motto.”
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668010440
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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