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THE 8TH CIRCLE

Name: THE 8TH CIRCLE
Author: Sarah Cain
ISBN: 978-1-62953-480-0

by Sarah Cain ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 12, 2016

This dark debut isn’t for everyone, but it’s great for what it is: tight, well-crafted, and nasty. It nails the noir.

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This dark thriller is a fast-paced plunge into a hell that reeks of sex and blood.

Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Danny Ryan gets right to the point: “We’re all dying, so we might as well get on with it.” He finds his friend and colleague Michael Cohen gut-shot and dying in a BMW on his property, and the victim’s dying word is “Inferno.” Danny’s wife, Beth, and son, Conor, had died in an accident almost a year earlier, so the coincidence of so many deaths is not lost on detectives John Novell and Sean McFarland. They suspect Danny may be good for the crime. But clearly someone has it in for Danny, who gets mysterious phone calls demanding he turn over a package he doesn’t think he has. And then he finds his poor dog, Beowulf, bludgeoned, dead in a pool of blood. In his car, Danny finds a woman’s human heart wrapped in a G-string and later finds the rest of her body in his bed. Inferno, he learns, is an organization that runs sex clubs with a clientele that includes important people having kinky sex. A congressman is burned to death, 22 girls have already been strangled by the Sandman, who is also suspected in the Ticonderoga-pencil killing of Danny’s brother, Junior (a No. 2 to the temple). Lots of people meet untimely ends at the hands of delightfully disgusting villains such as Mason, who sees in Danny “beauty wrought by the exquisite hand of suffering.” Repetition of William Blake’s line “Some are born to endless night” weaves an apt theme throughout. The novel’s title, of course, is from Dante’s Inferno, where some of the victims are bound for “the eighth circle with the other hypocrites and frauds.”

This dark debut isn’t for everyone, but it’s great for what it is: tight, well-crafted, and nasty. It nails the noir.

Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-62953-480-0

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crooked Lane

Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015

Categories:

THRILLER | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER | POLITICAL, MILITARY & TERRORISM

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
TWO NIGHTS
by Kathy Reichs

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DARK MATTER

by Blake Crouch ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 26, 2016

Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.

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A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.

Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.

Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.