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
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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