It doesn’t matter that Mosby has no interest in tying up all the dozens of loose ends left dangling. This is a powerfully...
Mosby’s latest nightmare poses a perfectly serious question most readers have probably never thought about: which is more harrowing, death or resurrection?
Two years after she was killed in a car crash, Charlie Matheson is found wandering the streets of her nameless English town, weak, disoriented, her face horribly mutilated, but incontestably alive. Her husband, Paul Carlisle, has moved on with his life, getting his new partner pregnant, and he refuses to believe that the woman is Charlie. For her part, Charlie doesn’t dispute the report of her death but tells Detective Mark Nelson that she’s spent the past two years in hell. Detective David Groves would certainly agree that you don’t have to die to experience hell. In the three years since Jamie, his 3-year-old son, disappeared and was found dead, he and his wife have split up, reuniting only for their annual private memorials, and he’s repeatedly been taunted by anonymous phone calls and birthday cards. But the latest card, which includes the message, “I know who did it,” crosses the line from sadistic to fiendish. Mark, who long ago lost a loved one whose death was never confirmed, succeeds in linking Charlie’s disappearance to the work of the 50/50 Killer, whose specialty of kidnapping couples and demanding that one of them decide which of them would be killed and which turned free was so harrowing that pursuing him got Detective John Mercer kicked off the force. But Mark is up against both an exceptionally evil cadre of villains and a resourceful author (The Nightmare Place, 2015, etc.) whose unannounced and often duplicitous shifts in time are in their own way just as nasty.
It doesn’t matter that Mosby has no interest in tying up all the dozens of loose ends left dangling. This is a powerfully haunting tale you don’t so much pursue to its resolution as mercifully awaken from.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68177-208-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
Perhaps too much ingenuity for its own good. But except for Jeffery Deaver and Sophie Hannah, no one currently working the...
Fired Scotland Yard detective Daniel Hawthorne bursts onto the scene of his unwilling collaborator and amanuensis, screenwriter/novelist Anthony, who seems to share all Horowitz’s (Forever and a Day, 2018, etc.) credentials, to tell him that the game’s afoot again.
The victim whose death requires Hawthorne’s attention this time is divorce attorney Richard Pryce, bashed to death in the comfort of his home with a wine bottle. The pricey vintage was a gift from Pryce’s client, well-to-do property developer Adrian Lockwood, on the occasion of his divorce from noted author Akira Anno, who reportedly celebrated in a restaurant only a few days ago by pouring a glass of wine over the head of her husband’s lawyer. Clearly she’s too good a suspect to be true, and she’s soon dislodged from the top spot by the news that Gregory Taylor, who’d long ago survived a cave-exploring accident together with Pryce that left their schoolmate Charles Richardson dead, has been struck and killed by a train at King’s Cross Station. What’s the significance of the number “182” painted on the crime scene’s wall and of the words (“What are you doing here? It’s a bit late”) with which Pryce greeted his murderer? The frustrated narrator (The Word Is Murder, 2018) can barely muster the energy to reflect on these clues because he’s so preoccupied with fending off the rudeness of Hawthorne, who pulls a long face if his sidekick says boo to the suspects they interview, and the more-than-rudeness of the Met’s DI Cara Grunshaw, who threatens Hawthorne with grievous bodily harm if he doesn’t pass on every scrap of intelligence he digs up. Readers are warned that the narrator’s fondest hope—“I like to be in control of my books”—will be trampled and that the Sherlock-ian solution he laboriously works out is only the first of many.
Perhaps too much ingenuity for its own good. But except for Jeffery Deaver and Sophie Hannah, no one currently working the field has anywhere near this much ingenuity to burn.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-267683-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Bohjalian manages to keep us guessing and turning pages until the very end.
In Bohjalian’s (The Flight Attendant, 2018, etc.) breathless thriller, the death of an American bicyclist in Vietnam sets off a race to avert further catastrophe.
Alexis, a doctor at an unnamed university hospital in Manhattan, met Austin six months ago when he came into her ER with a bullet in his arm, fired by a junkie in a bar where Austin and a chance acquaintance, Douglas, were playing darts. Austin works as a fundraiser at the same hospital. In fact, his office, significantly as we will learn, is near a rodent research lab. The present action takes place over a countdown clock of 10 days, beginning in Vietnam, where the new couple is on a bike tour. Austin goes for a solo ride, telling Alexis he wants to pay respects by visiting the locations where his uncle was killed and his father wounded during the war. When he doesn’t return, Alexis goes out looking for him, finding a few packets of energy gel that we already know Austin dropped on the road while being abducted—by Douglas. Pressing Austin for information, Douglas drives a dart into Austin’s hand. Vietnamese police discover Austin’s body and a post-mortem concludes that he was killed in a hit-and-run collision. While identifying the body, though, Alexis notices the wound on Austin’s hand and suspects foul play. Back in New York, she hires Ken, a PI, to investigate. Quang, a Vietnamese police captain, suspects that Austin was a smuggler, but of what? Alexis soon learns that Austin had lied about many things, not least his true mission in Vietnam. What characters learn, and when, is critical. Abetted by shifting points of view, seemingly disparate elements eventually converge to create a burgeoning sense of dread. Italicized, anonymous first-person comments, interspersed throughout, cite the long history of rats as quickly evolving plague carriers—most recently, of antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Among many tantalizing questions: Austin’s former boss Sally is Douglas’ lover—where do her loyalties lie? In fact, whose side is Douglas on? And what is in those packets?
Bohjalian manages to keep us guessing and turning pages until the very end.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54480-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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