An intriguing mystery, although some elements strain credulity.
A hit man trying to hide his past gets entangled with people with similarly violent backstories in Thorson’s debut thriller.
A government contract killer, intent on starting a new life, finds an alias among authors’ names in a South Dakota bookstore: Malcolm Winters. He orders corresponding fake identification from a Nashville-based forger known as “Freddy Four-Fingers.” In the Music City, Mal is nursing his third drink at a bluegrass dive when a woman named Fyre Stockton,whom he sees as “every man’s fantasy,”sits next to him. The two share small talk before she announces she has to leave. The next morning, he runs into her at his hotel, and soon they’re in her room, “crashing down upon the mattress.” After they part ways, Mal decides to head to Chicago, where Fyre said she lives. Oddly, once there, he waits over a month to call her, but he’s been busy: He bought a three-apartment building and conned the University of Illinois at Chicago into hiring him as a visiting English professor. He begins seriously dating Fyre but also forms a close relationship with fellow faculty member Vinn. Fyre and Vinn both have a penchant for danger and secrecy, just as Mal does. Then a shocking murder propels Malcolm into a century-old mystery—one that needs to be solved to prevent more killing. Large sections of the book move quickly, as when Mal tails Fyre from her apartment to a deserted building where danger lurks. However, portions involving Mal’s tenant, who suffers from dissociative identity disorder, border on caricature. Mal’s haughty critiques of others are also overdone, be they heavier than him, middle-aged, or cat lovers. Thorson, who lives just outside Chicago, describes the city and its neighborhoods beautifully. However, it seems naïve to suggest that UIC would hire a professor without a background check. It’s also unrealistic that Mal would outfit his kitchen with “a selection of knives, knuckles, canisters of mace, and one wicked, spiked cross between a hammer and a club,” engineered to drop down from the ceiling whenever he yells the word tequila.
An intriguing mystery, although some elements strain credulity.Pub Date: May 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64750-319-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Austin Macauley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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