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Passing Through

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

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TELL ME WHAT YOU DID

Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.

A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.

Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?

Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.

Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025

ISBN: 9781464226229

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Poisoned Pen

Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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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