A page-turner that places a premium on shocking its readers.
A monstrous criminal descends upon a small town in Clark’s gory thriller.
Six years ago, Elliot Keller raped and murdered three young women in a cabin near Virginia’s Appalachian Trail. Now he’s serving time at the Virginia Maximum Correctional Institution. He’s a smooth-talking, low-maintenance prisoner, which leads to him getting a coveted overnight laundry detail. He plans to escape during one of the prison’s routine night deliveries and sate his appetite for violence. Meanwhile, in the cozy town of Thompson Trails, Virginia, a massive storm approaches. Sheriff Robert Brown makes the rounds, checking in on citizens, including Rick and Donna Welk, who own a series of lakeside cabins near the Appalachian Trail. Although the storm makes the likelihood of anyone renting a cabin slim, Rick and Donna are prepared for anything. Suddenly, a man who calls himself Elias Derringer steps from the wilderness and into their establishment. Rick is hospitable, offering him coffee, but he gets a bad feeling from the stranger. He doesn’t plan to rent a room to him for even one night and instead points him toward the local sheriff to help him continue on through Thompson Trails. When Elias ends up in a cell for the night, overseen by Deputy Darren Rush, his diabolical plan begins. Clark creates a memorable villain in this gripping thriller. Readers learn how Keller, during his childhood, witnessed “unspeakable things” that imprinted on him and inform the sadism that he inflicts on own victims. Clark’s energetic prose intensifies descriptions of brutality: “His head was nothing more than a bloody pulp with a small spot of brain pulsating grotesquely from his frontal lobe.” However, casual thriller fans may find such moments, as well as those depicting sexual violence, gratuitous. The tale works best as an over-the-top horror piece, as no other aspect of the narrative supersedes Clark’s penchant for savagery. The twist ending, however, will strike some readers as unearned moralizing.
A page-turner that places a premium on shocking its readers.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8414142461
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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