A dynamic addition to a consistently thrilling series.
A very bad man has painted a target on Nora Watts’ back, and she vows to find him before he finds her…and her daughter, Bonnie.
Nora, who has a talent for finding people, missing or otherwise, is back in Vancouver after the events of It All Falls Down(2018), in which she investigated her father’s death in Detroit. She hopes to get to know 17-year-old Bonnie, whom she gave up for adoption, and she’s also anxious to be reunited with her beloved dog, Whisper. But where Nora goes, trouble usually follows. An ex-soldier named Dao has put a bounty on her head and has no qualms about using Bonnie to get to her. After all, she killed his lover and his previous employer two years ago. Nora plans to take on this threat herself, but despite her best efforts to keep everyone she knows from getting too close, she’s got a few allies who don’t plan on letting her tackle this alone. PI and ex-cop (and Nora’s former lover and AA sponsor) Jon Brazuca joins the search no matter how much Nora tries to shake him, and he realizes that he’s still carrying a torch for her. Brazuca has a few extra tools at his disposal, namely the resources made available by the security firm that employs him as well as billionaire former client Bernard Lam, who has his own motives for pursuing Dao. The few breadcrumbs they find lead Nora, Brazuca, and Lam to Indonesia, where they hatch a plot to snare Dao. Nora has a suspicion she might be the bait, but she’s not about to let him get to Bonnie. In Kamal’s third book to feature Nora, the author hints at the possibility of brighter days ahead for her complicated heroine, if only Nora can stop the man who harbors a deep hatred of her and who won’t stop until she’s dead. It’s worth noting that Kamal has never been one for overly neat endings. Don’t expect her to start now. Fans of Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary and Kristen Lepionka’s Roxane Weary will especially find a lot to like.
A dynamic addition to a consistently thrilling series.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-286976-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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