Short on mystery, but rewardingly sensitive in teasing out the shock waves that reached from the Summer of Love to the heart...
A wild tale by an untrustworthy witness sets Kinsey Millhone (T Is for Trespass, 2007, etc.) on the track of a stone-cold case.
An article on famous kidnappings has jogged Michael Sutton to recall something that happened on his sixth birthday in July 1967. Playing at a friend’s house in Horton Ravine, he tells Kinsey nearly 21 years later, Sutton saw two men burying something he’s now convinced was the body of Mary Claire Fitzhugh, a kidnapped 12-year-old who was never restored to her parents, even though they paid the paltry ransom demand. Sutton doesn’t remember the exact location of the house or even the name of the friend, but Kinsey agrees to take a day’s pay to check out his story. Even within a day, she gets results, and soon the Santa Teresa canine unit is sniffing around an unmarked grave. Unfortunately, the buried remains aren’t those of Mary Claire Fitzhugh. Worse, mounting evidence indicates that there’s good reason to doubt Sutton’s memory. As Kinsey struggles with the case, distracted by the latest overtures from the family that abandoned her long ago, the puzzle is obligingly, if gradually, resolved by a long series of interspersed flashbacks to the summer of 1967, when four families—Patrick and Deborah Unruh, their rebellious son and his common-law wife; veterinarian Walter McNally and his son Walker; professor Lionel Corso and his son Jon; and Kip and Annabelle Sutton, the parents Kinsey’s client once accused of molesting him—were launched on a collision course.
Short on mystery, but rewardingly sensitive in teasing out the shock waves that reached from the Summer of Love to the heart of Santa Teresa.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-15597-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Marian Wood/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
One of her best. Poirot, again on vacation, falls foul of a murder on board a Nile river steamer, followed by two successive murders, obviously connected. A sophisticated group, an ingenious plot, clever deduction, swift-paced narrative. A little romance on the side lends glamour. First rate entertainment.
Pub Date: Feb. 8, 1938
ISBN: 0062073559
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1938
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Hill’s debut is a chilling psychological thriller with an unusual heroine and a page-turning storyline.
A woman who uses her research skills to track down missing people finds herself over her head in a dangerous case.
Hester Thursby has taken a leave from her library job at Harvard to help her boyfriend, Morgan, care for Kate, the little daughter of Daphne, his twin sister and Hester’s best friend. When she gets a call from Lila Blaine of New Hampshire, who wants her to find Sam, the brother who’s been missing for 12 years, she’s attracted by the promise of mental stimulation and extra money. Lila gives Hester a stack of postcards from all over the United States, each composed of photos her brother presumably took himself and a single sentence. Sam ran away with Gabe DiPursio, a 14-year-old foster child who was staying with Lila and him at the time. Lila admits the reason she wants to find Sam is because she’s selling a valuable piece of lake property. After talking to Gabe’s former foster mother and the social worker he had at the time, Hester, using the most recent postcards as clues, discovers that Sam and Gabe are living in Boston, where Sam’s posing as Aaron Gewirtzman, a young college graduate who was killed in an accident. She doesn’t know that the pair have left a trail of disaster in their wake: Sam has used his charm and good looks to hook up with wealthy women while Gabe uses his computer skills to raise money to tide them over between marks. Sam’s currently preoccupied by the wealthy socialite he’s dating, but Gabe, who meets Hester when she scopes them out by pretending to be looking for an apartment to rent, becomes totally fixated on her. Real danger threatens Hester when she learns too much about their past and present.
Hill’s debut is a chilling psychological thriller with an unusual heroine and a page-turning storyline.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1590-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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