An engaging and loving look at small-town Southern life with an appealing sleuth.
A “star reporter”—on the scene when a crashed Cessna explodes—sees a man run from the disaster and is determined to discover his identity and what caused the plane to blow up.
In McCoy’s debut mystery, journalist Daisy McLaren and photographer/videographer Jake Smith report on a plane crash on a remote mountain near the town of Franklin, North Carolina. Daisy sees a man race from the plane just as it explodes unexpectedly. She watches as he heads toward the Walker family’s farm. Daisy went to school with Caleb Walker “until tenth grade, when he just quit coming.” She always found the Walkers “strange, and now she wondered whether they might have something to do with the plane crash.” When she ignores Jake’s warning not to visit the family by herself, she’s met with a pack of dogs and the gun-toting patriarch demanding she get off his land. Daisy’s mother died a few years earlier in a car accident near the mountain where the plane crashed. The reporter still tries to unravel details of the accident along with the mystery of the exploding plane. When she learns about an influx of heroin in town, Daisy suspects a connection to the plane. While gun shy about relationships with men, she does open her heart to a stray cat she names Rescue. In this series opener, the hero is heavily reminiscent of Nancy Drew; both have attorney fathers and dead mothers; both enjoy tooling around town, Daisy in a Jeep, Nancy in a roadster. Both have chaste relationships with their men—Daisy with Jake, Nancy with Ned Nickerson. But while Nancy is a New Englander, Daisy is a Southerner, like the author, and images of North Carolina’s forests, mountains, and small shops are inviting. Sections on Native American legends and lore add to the story, which takes place largely in Franklin, once home to the Cherokee Nation and other tribes. The mystery itself fails to be heart-pounding, but there is much sweetness in Daisy’s relationships with others and with Rescue, who curls “like a croissant” on the couch or “wreaths” herself on a bed pillow.
An engaging and loving look at small-town Southern life with an appealing sleuth.Pub Date: July 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-578-93085-5
Page Count: 271
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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