by Samuel J. Spitalli ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A mostly riveting tale of a frantic criminal on the run.
After faking his death, a con man resorts to murder in a desperate attempt to keep his second life a secret in Spitalli’s thriller.
Lydia Scranton is lucky to survive after a plane she’s piloting crashes into Florida’s swampy Everglades. Her husband, Joel, however, is presumed dead after searchers fail to find his body. But eight years later, airboat operator Dan Clayton has a story for Joel’s daughter, Jane Cartwright-Scranton, an FBI agent at the Chicago office. He claims that on that day, he rescued Joel, who insisted unconscious Lydia was dead. Following an initial round of questioning with feds, Clayton suffers a considerable mishap. Readers learn that Joel is indeed alive and has been living under another name with his mistress all these years. It turns out maintaining his new identity, as well as the illicit millions in his offshore accounts, may necessitate killing to keep people quiet. As one of those people has mob connections, Joel is soon evading the Mafia along with authorities who connect him to recent homicides. But it’s a jailbreak with two dangerous convicts that exacerbates Joel’s predicament in a way he can neither predict nor easily allay. Spitalli writes well-detailed, exciting set pieces, like when a wounded Lydia faces alligators in the swamp with little more than a flare gun. Similarly, despite the baddie’s despicability, his having to stay ahead of Mafia types and nosy cops maintains a persistently intense narrative. Nevertheless, a smart but repetitive subplot of Jane’s fighting a clear case of sexual harassment nearly overwhelms the story. Things pick up, though, once the convicts enter the fray, and an outlandish plot turn energizes the final act.
A mostly riveting tale of a frantic criminal on the run. (author’s note, author bio)Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Amy Tintera ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2024
Smart, edgy, and entertaining as heck.
Against her better judgment, Lucy Chase returns to her hometown of Plumpton, Texas, for her grandmother’s birthday, knowing full well that almost everyone in town still believes she murdered her best friend five years ago, when they were in their early 20s.
Coincidentally—or is it?—Ben Owens, a true-crime podcaster, is also in town, interviewing Lucy’s family and former friends about the murder of Savannah Harper, “just the sweetest girl you ever met,” who died from several violent blows to the head. Lucy was found hours later covered in blood, with no memory of what happened. She was—and is—a woman with secrets, which has not endeared her to the people of Plumpton; their narrative is that she was always violent, secretive, difficult. But Ben wants to tell Lucy’s story; attractive and relentless, he uncovers new evidence and coaxes new interviews, and people slowly begin to question whether Lucy is truly guilty. Lucy, meanwhile, lets down her guard, and as she and Ben draw closer together, she has to finally face the truth of her past and unmask the murderer of her complicated, gorgeous, protective friend. Most of the novel is told from Lucy’s point of view, which allows for a natural unspooling of the layers of her life and her story. She’s strong, she’s prickly, and we gradually begin to understand just how wronged she has been. The story is a striking commentary on the insular and harmful nature of small-town prejudice and how women who don’t fit a certain mold are often considered outliers, if not straight-up villains. Tintera is smart to capitalize on how the true-crime podcast boom informs and infuses the current fictional thriller scene; she’s also effective at writing action that transcends the podcast structure.
Smart, edgy, and entertaining as heck.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781250880314
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
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SEEN & HEARD
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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