Nonetheless: a shrewdly judged female actioner, tailor-made for audiences who would’ve loved Deliverance if it hadn’t been...
An Atlanta prosecutor, revisiting the area where her Cherokee mother was slain 12 years earlier, steps off the edge of the civilized universe into a world of trouble.
After turning her sixth indictment into her sixth conviction, rookie A.D.A. Mary Crow is ready to celebrate. And it’s time as well that she faced the ghosts back in Little Jump Off, North Carolina, by making a pilgrimage to her mother’s grave and the convenience store where she was robbed, raped, and murdered. Accompanied by her lawyer friends Alexandra McCrimmin and Joan Marchetti, she plans a weekend of physically strenuous but spiritually tonic camping in Nantahala National Forest. But the women aren’t alone in the forest primeval. Mitchell Whitman, brother of the latest convict Mary helped put away, has armed himself to the teeth and decided to do some camping too. And that’s not all. To while away the hours before Mitch can overtake the trio, debut novelist Bissell supplies a crackpot trapper whose mastery of woodlore, coupled with his delusive certainty that Alex is really Trudy, the dead sister who haunts him even more insistently than Mary’s mother haunts her, makes him every bit as dangerous as that city slicker Mitch. After a conscientious, laborious start, Bissell tightens the screws slowly and expertly, providing some spectacular, often threatening, mountain scenery along the way. Credibility and suspense are both strained, though, by the multiplication of villains who have to wait in line for a crack at their potential victims, especially when most of the victims don’t even know the predators exist, and the predators don’t know about each other either. And a nagging loose end at the fadeout will leave plenty of readers piqued.
Nonetheless: a shrewdly judged female actioner, tailor-made for audiences who would’ve loved Deliverance if it hadn’t been for all the guy stuff.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-553-80128-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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