A sharp-witted detective hunts a psychopath schooled in murder; highly recommended.
A series of brutal murders in Boston tests the police and terrifies a book club.
As Bruneau’s debut mystery begins, Augusta “Gussie” Watkins races to her fifth-floor Cambridge apartment after work because she will host book club that night. Reaching her building, she takes the elevator, which suddenly stops between floors. A hatch atop the lift opens, and a hand emerges. That night, police find Gussie’s body with her eyes cut out. Near the body is scrawled the message, “Justice is blind.” Two days later, an elite runner is discovered dead in Boston Common with a knife in her back. A note nearby reads, “Justice is swift.” Chief Homicide Investigator Dimase Augustin realizes he’s hunting a serial killer, and he soon discovers both murdered women were in the same book club—a club that has more members, and they all are in danger. The killer, revealed early on, dishes out payback for an injustice he felt was dealt to him years ago when he was a university biology professor at MIT. Financed by “angel investors” in his work on a cure for Alzheimer’s, much of his research involved mice dissection. Did mutilating Gussie bother him? No, he “just thought of her as a big mouse.” For years he planned the murder while he played the long game in terms of going off the grid. Now, when Augustin suspects the former prof, he’s gone without a trace. Bruneau doesn’t rush the book club members’ backstories, likes, and routines. The reader feels they know these women, which raises the stakes. A believable time frame, intelligent dialogue, an abundance of twists, and escalation in the psychopath’s violence lead to quick page turns. Characters are intelligent, and a mix of races is represented. Augustin, a smart, albeit chain-smoking, middle-aged African American chief cop, deserves prominence in a sequel.
A sharp-witted detective hunts a psychopath schooled in murder; highly recommended.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-8738-7
Page Count: 334
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.
The loss of her police officer father and the discovery of an abandoned car in a local lake raise chilling questions regarding a young woman’s family history.
When Hazel Sharp returns to her hometown of Mirror Lake, North Carolina, for her father’s memorial, she and the other townspeople are confronted by a challenging double whammy: As they’re grieving the loss of beloved longtime police officer Detective Perry Holt, a disturbing sight appears in the lake, whose waterline is receding because of an ongoing drought—an old, unidentifiable car, which has likely been lurking there for years. Hazel temporarily leaves her Charlotte-based building-renovation business in the capable hands of her partners and reconnects with her brothers, Caden and Gage; her Uncle Roy; her old fling and neighbor, Nico; and her schoolfriend, Jamie, now a mother and married to Caden. Tiny, relentless suspicions rise to the metaphorical surface along with that waterlogged vehicle: There have been a slew of minor break-ins; two people go missing; and then, a second abandoned car is discovered. The novel digs deeper into Hazel’s family history—her father was a widow when he married Hazel’s mother, who later left the family, absconding with money and jewels—and Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation: “Everything mattered disproportionately in a small town. Your success, but also your failure. Everyone knows might as well have been our town motto.”
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668010440
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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