An amusingly quirky read that might have benefited from a stronger edit.
A comedic murder mystery set on a college campus in upstate New York stars an offbeat heroine with an active imagination.
Twenty-nine-year-old Ruby Roy is an associate professor at Baron University’s College of Business, located not far from Niagara Falls. She’s the well-traveled only child of an Indian diplomat father and a Canadian mother, and she holds several postgraduate degrees from various prestigious universities. She also has a history of awkward moments and embarrassing incidents, due largely to bad luck and social anxiety. Now she’s working to get tenure at Baron, while her husband, Cleo, is attempting to create his first video game. Ruby is mostly happy at the university, where she has a coterie of eclectic international friends among the faculty. One evening, she returns to her office to retrieve a forgotten backpack and decides to say hello to her department chair, Dr. Peter Malcolm; instead, she discovers him sitting in his office chair, mouth agape and eyes staring lifelessly. A knife handle protrudes from his bloody chest. Then someone hits her on the head and knocks her unconscious. She wakes up in an ambulance and is questioned by police detective Chris Jones. Although badly shaken, Ruby is a fan of British detective shows and American TV police procedurals, and she soon feels compelled to investigate the murder herself. The narrative has all the right ingredients for an intriguing whodunit. However, Ray often chooses humor over suspense, indulging in numerous digressions and cartoonishly exaggerated characters. Many pages are filled with Ruby’s busy, fanciful interior musings, which draw on the tropes of action-hero adventures and Indian romantic musicals. It’s often a fun romp that occasionally borders on slapstick. It does lack a certain restraint, though; Ray tends to overexplain celebrity references that most will find obvious, and Ruby’s dream sequences are too lengthy. Still, the mystery builds to an exciting climax, and there’s an unexpected final twist.
An amusingly quirky read that might have benefited from a stronger edit.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 979-8793362641
Page Count: 232
Publisher: BMB Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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