The most ruthlessly contractual account of family life you’ll ever read.
Prentiss’ dark debut shows a Massachusetts family torn apart by murder.
This isn’t Jessica Thornton’s first stab at domestic bliss. Raised by a father who beat her mother and first wed to an alcoholic car salesman killed in a one-car DUI, she’s been married for three years to sweet, understanding realtor Ted Donovan. Ted’s son, computer geek Craig, and Jessica’s daughter, track star Emma, have never bonded, and Ted’s hit a dry patch that’s made the family depend more than ever on the pittance Jessica earns as a bank teller. But all this seems perfectly normal until Sam Warner, the bullying captain of the wrestling team at Craig and Emma’s high school, is shot to death on a night when both the kids had sneaked out of the house, allegedly to take part in a scavenger hunt arranged by an unidentified party, and Ted falsely claims to have been home watching TV with Jessica. As Detective Doug Rafferty, of the Warner Police Department, tracks down one lead after the other, evidence implicates someone in the family. Even more devastatingly, it becomes alarmingly clear that each family member’s loyalty is sharply limited. Jessica favors her daughter, Ted his son, and the children evidently no one but themselves rather than each other. The remorseless progress of Prentiss’ narrative, which rivals Harlan Coben’s suburban thrillers in its scope and mastery, reveals so many unspeakable secrets, most of them withheld from anyone else in the family, that the most urgent question that emerges is which of them is the biggest monster. The fade-out, pitilessly detailing the costs of their survival, is as horrifying as the threats that have been challenging them.
The most ruthlessly contractual account of family life you’ll ever read.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61316-192-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scarlet
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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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