Strictly for dog lovers and action fans. Dogs-in-action junkies will be transported.
A fifth outing pits search-and-rescue officer Meg Jennings and her canine partner against a serial killer whose choice of weapons drives the story.
The shooting of Sgt. Noah Hubbert, of the Georgia State Patrol, would be shocking under any circumstances. What sets it apart is the fact that he’s been shot with an arrow—and that he’s not the first such victim in the area. Tim Reynolds, the chairman of the Fannin County Board of Commissioners, was struck down by an identical arrow two weeks ago. The killer’s modus operandi should make him absurdly easy to track down: How many archers can reliably hit their targets from as far away as this one clearly was? And the most likely motive is pretty clear too: opposition to the Copperhill Dam, which has been planned to manage the water level of the Toccoa River, which separates McCaysville, Georgia, from Copperhill, Tennessee. But that doesn’t deprive Driscoll of the opportunity for several gripping sequences involving the tracking of the suspect by members of the Human Scent Evidence Team and their canine partners. These action sequences, juiced by the heroine’s fear of heights, are terrific, and the interplay between the dogs and their handlers is deeply felt. But neither the plotting nor the characterization measures up to them. Meg’s friend Clay McCord, of the Washington Post, generates a list of award-winning archers, and then Meg and Special Agent Sam Torres, of the Atlanta FBI, go down the list, trying to ignore the mounting body count, till a profiler points them to the only suspect who’s come close to making an impression.
Strictly for dog lovers and action fans. Dogs-in-action junkies will be transported.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2249-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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