A somber, readable tale of frontier psychodrama.
Falconer’s whodunit, set in 19th-century Sydney Cove, New South Wales, stars a haunted, hard-drinking investigator.
It’s 1875, and Inspector Cormag Macleod is a gruff, older, haunted man who can handle himself in a back-alley brawl. Macleod spends much of the book hung over and likes brooding over his pipe. He’s a bit rancorous as the novel opens. Not only must he trek out to Allynbrook to investigate a murder, but he’s saddled with Constable McDermott, a helper/watcher who’s barely 20. At Allynbrook, this odd couple finds a clue—a leather disc with a distinctive brand that leads them even further into the hinterland, to small subsistence farms. As Macleod and McDermott make their way to a distant property called Ravenscroft (“a lovely place, sitting high atop the hill with the river winding around it”), they encounter an entire cast of hardscrabble farmers raising pigs and growing tobacco and wheat, living day to day. Most of them harbor secrets of some kind. The pair encounters ferocious storms, murders, and a crazed kind of butchery that seems to verge well beyond the human realm in its depravity; it all leads to a vivid, brutal climax. Falconer draws this provincial world well, although the book’s most memorable creation is Macleod himself, a hard man with a soft heart and a jaded worldview (“Most of the evil in this world is in men,” he tells McDermott, in answer to a question about whether or not he believes in ghosts, “we don’t need spirits for evil to be close to us”). The prose is often distractingly purple (“He saw colleagues and friends, those who where succumbing to their injuries slowly, as the tide of blood ebbed from them, their lives slipping away,” and so on), but the dark atmosphere carries the reader along.
A somber, readable tale of frontier psychodrama.Pub Date: June 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72493-553-3
Page Count: 318
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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