by Sophie McKenzie ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 15, 2015
McKenzie ups her game in this one.
Children's-book author McKenzie follows her first adult novel (Close My Eyes, 2013) with another intense thriller.
Livy's best friend, Julia, both texts and calls her, saying that she needs to speak to her right away, but Livy ignores her pleas. Livy’s having issues of her own: She’s about to attend an office party with her husband, Will, where she's going to have to meet Catrina, a woman Will had an affair with six years earlier. Livy almost left Will when she found out about the affair, but she stayed for the kids—sweet-natured Zack and the selfish, incredibly annoying Hannah. Livy became best friends with Julia following the murder of Livy’s younger sister, Kara, who had been Julia's good friend, and now Julia, a single freelance journalist, is Hannah’s godmother. When Livy and the kids go to Julia's house and find her dead of an apparent overdose of Nembutal and alcohol, the day after Livy didn't respond to her messages, she becomes convinced that Julia was murdered. When her investigation shows Julia’s life was both happy and fulfilled and that she had been looking into Kara’s killing, Livy becomes even more convinced that she's right. McKenzie employs two of the same techniques she used in Close My Eyes: She offers an alternate voice in the form of chapters narrated by the unnamed killer, talking about cruelty to the family cat and all the women he’s killed in sometimes very explicit detail. She also alternates from present to past tense, depending upon which character tells the story, with the murderer speaking in the past and Livy’s tale told in the present. The killer’s story works best, with less self-conscious prose, but unlike authors who foreshadow so much that the reader knows the identity of the killer, McKenzie employs a light touch, surprising readers as they follow along.
McKenzie ups her game in this one.Pub Date: April 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-03399-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Share your opinion of this book
More by Sophie McKenzie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Share your opinion of this book
More About This Book
by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Lisa Jewell
BOOK REVIEW
by Lisa Jewell
BOOK REVIEW
by Lisa Jewell
BOOK REVIEW
by Lisa Jewell
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.