This psychological tale brings Ireland to life, but sometimes leaves its killer in the background.
In this thriller, a detective and a psychologist become romantically involved while hunting a brutal murderer in Ireland.
The year is 1999, and Cork is experiencing a series of ritualistic murders. The female victims, appearing one month apart, all have two beauty marks on the right sides of their necks. Evidence shows they’ve been tortured prior to death and raped afterward. Chief Investigator Sean O’Neill from Dublin assists the local police with his deep cultural knowledge and keen observation skills. He quickly identifies a drawing, knifed in a tree at a crime scene, of what appears to be the Eye of Horus. Also working the case is Erin Parker, an American criminal psychologist, who’s capable of keeping up with Sean’s roaming intellect. As evidence leads the investigators around Cork and to Dublin, Erin becomes infatuated with Sean and his rational, though combative, personality. One of their conversations leads to the biblical Abaddon, “the king of the abyss, the demon of death and destruction,” whose symbol Sean mistook for the Eye of Horus. Eventually, they follow leads pointing to a Dublin gangster named Abaddon and one of his missing crew members, Ray Queen. When a man named Michael Byrne claims to have escaped being murdered, the case grows even more complex. Abdullaoglu offers sparkling portrayals of Cork and many famous locations, including the An Spailpín Fánac pub. (The book, originally in Azerbaijani, was translated by Berlina.) The author also cannily employs Ireland’s frequent rain to make collecting evidence tough for the investigators. The grisly nature of the murders will grip genre fans hard and pull them along. In a letter to the protagonists, the killer asserts, “I am the thunderstorm of all your secret dreams and desires,” which hints at a poet/murderer from the mind of Thomas Harris, author of The Silence of the Lambs. But Abdullaoglu’s fondness for Sean, who’s as egotistical as he is smart, leads the narrative astray. Digressions into everything from the hormonal content of beer to the validity of patriarchal leadership often leave the pair starry-eyed and seemingly divorced from hunting a murderer.
This psychological tale brings Ireland to life, but sometimes leaves its killer in the background.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.
A struggling writer finds an unexpected muse when a mysterious man shows up at her cabin.
Petra Rose used to pump out a bestselling book every six months, but then the adaptation happened—that is, the disastrous film adaptation of her most famous book. The movie changed the book’s storyline so egregiously that fans couldn’t forgive her, and the ensuing harassment sent Petra into hiding and gave her a serious case of writer’s block. Petra’s one hope is her solo writing retreat at a remote cabin, where she can escape the distractions of real life and focus on her next book, a story about a woman having an affair with a cop. When officer Nathaniel Saint shows up at her cabin door, inspiration comes flooding back. Much like the character from Petra’s book, Saint is married, and he’s willing to be Petra’s muse, helping her get into her characters’ heads. Petra’s book is practically writing itself, but is the game she’s playing a little too dangerous? Does she know when to stop—and, more importantly, is Saint willing to stop? Hoover is no stranger to controversial movie adaptations and internet backlash, but she clarifies in a note to readers that she’s “just a writer writing about a writer” and that no further connections to her own life are contained in these pages—which is a good thing, because the book takes some horrifying twists and turns. Petra finds herself inexplicably attracted to Saint, even as she describes him as “such an asshole,” and her feelings for him veer between love and hate. The novel serves as a meta commentary on the dark romance genre—as Petra puts it, “Even though, as readers, we wouldn’t want to live out some of the fantasies we read about, it doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy reading those things.”
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781662539374
Page Count: -
Publisher: Montlake
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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