by R.J. Ellory ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 10, 2010
Ellory’s prose is rather colorless, the plot lacks pace and momentum and Irving, at the center of it, is lackluster.
Uneven thriller about a New York City police detective who tracks a copycat serial killer.
Ellroy (A Quiet Belief in Angels, 2009) begins with the appealing John Costello, nearly 17 and growing up in Jersey City. When John spots Nadia, a beautiful young woman, they begin a passionate relationship. One night, as they sit outdoors, a man approaches from behind and smashes Nadia’s head with a hammer. Nadia dies, John narrowly escapes and the killer eventually commits suicide at a psychiatric facility. Ellroy now jumps forward 11 years and, in what may be a strategic mistake, shifts to the point of view of police detective Ray Irving. The author provides ample details to animate Irving and his Manhattan, but neither the man nor the place equal the vibrance of Costello and his Jersey City. At work, Irving confronts a killing similar to Nadia’s—in Bryant Park, the body of a teenage girl turns up, her head crushed. Then the bodies of two teenage girls, shot in the head, are dumped along FDR Drive. Later, the body of a young man, his face painted like a clown, is found in a drain. A story in the City Herald traces the killings to those of serial killers of the past. Because all these killers were executed or are currently imprisoned, the story suggests a copycat killer is at large. How did reporter Karen Langley develop this theory? With aid from research assistant John Costello, who now obsessively compiles information about serial killers. Langley points out to Irving that the present-day killings occur on the anniversaries of the earlier murders. Aided by Langley and Costello, Irving digs through a massive haystack of serial-murder cases to find a needle—another case the killer will recreate. After several dead-ends, the three face off with the Anniversary Man in a tense scene in Madison Park.
Ellory’s prose is rather colorless, the plot lacks pace and momentum and Irving, at the center of it, is lackluster.Pub Date: June 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59020-327-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
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
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