A rough novel that’s as engrossing as it is bleak.
In Parr’s debut thriller, a 16-year-old seeks revenge in the grim and gritty London of the 1970s, where a wealthy secret society pulls the strings.
Neglected by his alcoholic mother, Jerry is brought up in a series of abusive, temporary homes. He grows up to be an intelligent but physically and mentally scarred teenager who feels morally bound to avenge the wrongs perpetrated against him. For example, he puts a teacher who beat him into a freezing marsh grave, and he burns down the house of the foster family who put him out on the street. After fellow street urchins assault and rob him, he force-feeds one of them a cocktail of drugs and robs him in kind. However, the cruelest people in the city operate behind the scenes: dirty cops and members of a secret society called the Firm, led by the aging, gout-riddled Sir Peter, a former British Intelligence operative. The Firm uses blackmail and murder to enrich themselves and includes the mantislike Vicar, who was one of Jerry’s worst abusers. Parr is adept at portraying his fictional world’s most unpleasant elements. Jerry, for example, is introduced to readers as a bawling, forgotten child left in his own filth—a heart-rending tableau that the author captures in all its grimy particulars. He uses this same attention to bring the flophouses and seedy clubs of ’70s London to life. His secondary characters are similarly well drawn; Jerry’s street-wise love interest, Scarlet, is as charmingly self-aware of her flaws as he is. A trio of schoolmates, introduced early on, are compelling in their banality, but they unfortunately disappear midnovel. Similarly, DI Jack Drummond and savvy Detective Constable Janice Morgan give law enforcement a human face, but they feel a little too separated from Jerry’s story. That said, there are worse things than leaving readers wanting more, and they’ll find it hard to leave Parr’s grim story behind.
A rough novel that’s as engrossing as it is bleak.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-83820-511-9
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Waggabolly
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
This complicated gothic thriller of dueling spouses and homicidal writers is cleverly plotted and neatly tied up.
An unhappy British couple attempt to rekindle the magic with a weekend trip to a remote spot in Scotland.
How is she tricking me? Feeney, the author of Sometimes I Lie (2017) and His and Hers (2020), has trained her readers to start asking this question immediately with her puzzle-box narratives. Well, you won't find out here. Only the basics: Amelia's won a weekend getaway in an office raffle, and as the novel opens, she and her screenwriter husband, Adam, who suffers from face blindness, along with their dog, Bob, are miserably making their way through a snowstorm to a destination in the Scottish Highlands which is no Airbnb Superhost, that's for sure. A freezing cold, barely converted church with many locked rooms and malfunctioning electricity, the property also features a mysterious caretaker who has left firewood and a nice note but seems to be spying through the window. Both Adam and Amelia seem to be considering this weekend the occasion for ending the marriage by any means necessary—then Bob disappears. The narrative goes back and forth with first-person chapters by Amelia and Adam interleaved with a series of letters written to Adam on their anniversary through the years and keyed to the traditional gifts: paper, cotton, wood, leather, etc. There's also a rock and a scissors, referring to the children's game of the book title, which the couple use to make everyday decisions like "Should we stay together?" Offstage is the famous writer Henry Winter, whose novels Adam has made his fortune adapting; through several author-characters, Feeney weaves in sometimes-grim observations about the literary life. On meeting a sourpuss cashier at the rural grocery store: "The woman wore her bitterness like a badge; the kind of person who writes one-star book reviews."
This complicated gothic thriller of dueling spouses and homicidal writers is cleverly plotted and neatly tied up.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-26610-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
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