An exciting series opener that delivers murder, drugs, and romance.
Chasing the truth about her uncle’s death, a gutsy television news photographer uncovers corruption and finds love in this debut thriller.
On assignment covering a man threatening to leap from atop a Hollywood hotel, Lucy Vega, a photographer for a local TV news station, realizes she knows the potential jumper. Naked and high on meth, Gary Mercer, the station’s former head of photography, comes off the ledge thanks to Lucy’s coaxing. Safely inside but crazed, he admits to Lucy a past crime—his mother didn’t die because of a fall; he murdered her by throwing her down the stairs. Afterward, he denies his confession and turns on Lucy because she knows the truth. A year later, working for heroin kingpin Luis Alvarez, who’s “kind of an El Chapo meets Al Capone,” Mercer learns that Lucy’s Uncle Henry, representing California in economic talks in Mexico City, has become a problem for the drug honcho’s operation. Mercer volunteers to eliminate Henry, making his death look like a car accident. Henry raised Lucy since she was orphaned as a child, and his death devastates her. She starts digging into the circumstances surrounding his crash. After killing Henry, Mercer accepts Alvarez’s diabolical assignment involving chemical companies linked to pharmaceutical subsidiaries. Lucy begins connecting the dots, and her investigations into Mercer’s and Alvarez’s activities get more dangerous, but she does share lighthearted times with her colleague Bea Middleton, a divorced mother of two. Bea’s love of pole dancing and designer duds makes her an unlikely best bud for no-nonsense Lucy, but the pair clicks. Lucy also eventually clicks with a new man, but will he be blue-eyed, former Special Ops soldier Brent Lucas or handsome documentarian Michael Burleson? Hinkin, a former TV news photographer, skillfully portrays irredeemable characters as well as likable but flawed ones in this first installment of the Vega and Middleton Mystery series. There’s a healthy mix of ethnicities, ages, and religions (at the news station’s holiday party, the executive playing Santa alternates his red cap with a blue yarmulke). Descriptions are vivid; a line of taillights becomes “a blood red trail creeping east.” Although the story moves briskly, editing could bring the 400-plus page count down considerably with no noticeable omissions. And despite the series title, this tale is more about Vega than Middleton. Still, the book is a promising debut.
An exciting series opener that delivers murder, drugs, and romance.Pub Date: April 1, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Literary Wanderlust
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
bookshelf
