A gritty, violent read with a tough, idiosyncratic, dryly witty heroine readers will root for even if they wouldn’t want to...
A Vancouver woman with demons to spare is asked to find a teen runaway in Kamal’s searing debut.
When Nora Watts receives a 5 a.m. phone call from a man named Everett Walsh insisting that she might know something about a missing girl, his desperation is palpable. Nora, who "help[s] look for missing people for a living," reluctantly meets with Everett and his wife, Lynn, and finds out that their 15-year-old daughter, Bonnie, is missing, but because she’s run away before, the police won’t take it seriously. Nora is their last resort, they tell her, because she's Bonnie's biological mother—she'd given the girl up for adoption 15 years earlier. At first, Nora doesn’t want anything to do with the case, but something pulls at her, and as she digs deeper, it threatens to pull her all the way under. Nora narrates her own story, and she doesn’t care if you like her. In fact, she keeps everyone at arm’s length, taking comfort only in her beloved dog, Whisper, stealing from those who show her kindness, and refusing help from the private investigator and journalist who employ her. Estranged from her younger sister and a former child of the foster care system, she used to seek solace in the bottle, and it always threatens right at the edge of her vision. Nora’s Vancouver in winter is one of endless natural beauty, but dark currents run beneath it that highlight the harsh treatment of indigenous people, especially girls and women, and the ease with which they are swept away and forgotten. It’s a bracing reality that underscores Nora’s painful, violent past, and debut novelist Kamal uses her own background in community activism to great effect. As Nora searches for Bonnie, the trail of corruption leads her to a wealthy family with ties to mining, but what would they have to do with a missing girl? The truth is beyond terrifying, and if readers think they know where this is going, they’ll likely be surprised. The brutal finale tests Nora to her very limits. Though comparisons to Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander are inevitable, Nora blazes her own shining trail.
A gritty, violent read with a tough, idiosyncratic, dryly witty heroine readers will root for even if they wouldn’t want to invite her home.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-256590-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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