A somewhat odd caper with appealing leads and eccentric structural issues.
In Ruckus’ mystery novel, sleuths Chance Yang and his wife, Catherine, take on a murder case rooted in the deep past.
In a prologue, an unnamed man is in a hospital; his unnamed sister has died after leaving him cryptic notes urging him to find her killer. The story proper begins in London, with Chance and Catherine’s friends celebrating the opening of Chance’s restaurant. Chance and Catherine marry and head to China for their honeymoon, where the British-born Catherine can meet Chance’s family. Interspersed with their largely pleasant time there are flashback passages from 2005 hinting at something dire happening at a summer camp, accompanied by desperate but disembodied pleas for help. Back in the present, a series of violent deaths occur at an abandoned building site near the place where Chance and Catherine are staying. They're galvanized into action, and the duo piece together what happened back in the past to result in these deaths almost 20 years later. This is a strange book: Chance and Catherine are likable enough, a pair in the tradition of crime-solving husband-and-wife teams such as Nick and Nora Charles, but the action in the first few chapters, set in London, has almost nothing to do (save for the presence of An, Chance’s cousin) with the narrative that unfolds in China—the important part of the plot. Some developments feel like non sequiturs; readers will learn a lot about Chinese cuisine and customs (“By the time Chance returned, the girl was teaching Catherine tongue twisters and jingles in Chinese. ‘Try this. Hong fenghuang, fen fenghuang, fenhong fonghuang, huang fenghuang. This means red phoenix, pink phoenix, pinkish-red phoenix, and yellow phoenix’”). There is a leisurely pace to the proceedings that seems indulgent—at one point, Chance and Catherine both have colonoscopies (there’s a fun date), leaving readers to wonder what their medical procedures add to the story. But such things are a matter of taste, and there are surely readers who like to go with the flow, as it were.
A somewhat odd caper with appealing leads and eccentric structural issues.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781916572249
Page Count: 313
Publisher: UK Book Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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