A remarkable protagonist leads a robust cast in this absorbing tale of self-discovery.
In this dramatic mystery, a teenager stuck in her small New England town takes a closer look at her brother’s fatal car accident.
Jordan Hawkins gives up a full scholarship to stay on her family farm in Asheville, Connecticut. The recent high school graduate puts college on hold, as she’s not sure her parents can handle the farm work without her. It’s only been a month since they lost Clay, Jordan’s older brother, who drove a truck with friends Tim Hatch and Tony Barbo into a tree—likely the result of drinking. Jordan becomes withdrawn and does little more than work at a factory and tend to the cows at home. But she does take some solace in Tim’s cousin Win Hatch, a former Asheville local who graduated from high school over a decade ago and now lives and works in Maine. There’s a chance their physical relationship could turn into something more, but then Jordan learns of Win’s somber past. He’s a recovering alcoholic who’s reputedly served time behind bars. As if that weren’t enough, Tony’s mom files suit against the Hawkins family and demands a much greater settlement than the farm insurance will cover. Townsfolk blame Clay for the others’ deaths, but Jordan has questions: How fast was he driving to cause the truck to burst into flames? When she finally investigates the accident, she somehow links it to an old toxic waste dump site. This shines a light on Asheville’s sordid history and stirs up secrets that some people don’t want unearthed.
Although mystery surrounds the truck accident, Davis’ character-driven story centers on its young protagonist. She’s resilient and sympathetic. Jordan denies herself time to grieve while Tony’s mother and even her own parents seem to forget she’s lost her brother. Jordan’s life gets more complicated later when she faces an important decision that, regardless of anyone else’s input, she must make on her own. The author effectively steeps the narrative in metaphors and analogies, from Jordan’s search for imperfections in bottles at the factory to the book’s title—a real-life place and anomaly in which cars in neutral ostensibly roll uphill. The simple, arresting prose is similarly inspired. Here, Jordan listens at her feuding parents’ bedroom door: “She waited there, crouched until her legs cramped and the cold settled into her bones. She heard her father snoring and her mother weeping, and she went back to bed, but she saw the sky change to a melon color before she fell into an uneasy sleep.” Supporting characters enrich Jordan’s tale and display distinctive personalities, including not-always-likable Win and environmentalist Eugene Martin, who’s keen on a fern species on the Hawkins property. While this cast propels the story, the understated mystery still engages. Readers, for example, know no more than Jordan regarding the fatal accident, and Asheville locals harbor quite a few skeletons. The final act wraps up this enigma without losing sight of the main journey as Jordan hopefully comes to terms with herself and where she wants to be.
A remarkable protagonist leads a robust cast in this absorbing tale of self-discovery.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-956440-06-5
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Madville Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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