An FBI agent goes after the hit-and-run driver who has killed her husband and newborn son—and so does nearly everyone else in greater Miami. Frank Benedict, driving home from an unsuccessful dinner with the prospective client he’s counting on to help him land a law partnership at 44, slams into the side of Charlie Calloway’s van in a fit of rage, then backs up and hits it again before driving off into the stormy night. Charlie, awakening in a hospital to find that she’s lost both husband and son—even her dog Paz has run away—vows revenge. Meanwhile, Frank’s told his blue-blooded wife Anita just enough lies to enlist her help in ditching his ruined BMW in a nearby swamp and reporting it stolen. It’s hardly the perfect crime, but he’d probably get away with it if it weren’t for all the forces of justice arrayed against him. Item: FBI forensic specialist Leo Wells seeks out his misfit ex-colleague Doug Logan, who developed an uncanny sensitivity to psychic phenomena after surviving a near-death experience. Item: Charlie’s old roommate, Dr. Lorraine Sneider, puts Charlie under hypnosis to see what details she can dredge up about the fatal night. Item: veterinarian Chrissy Lincoln, whose mother took in the fleeing Paz under the impression that he was a reincarnation of her late husband, recognizes him as the dog mentioned in accounts of the incident. Item: even Anita finds herself tempted by the $1 million reward Charlie’s old friend Chico Ruiz, the gay talk-radio host, is offering. And now that Charlie herself, having been pronounced dead for two minutes at the hospital, has developed a seventh sense like Logan’s, the biggest question is which of these avengers can get to hapless Frank Benedict first. Too many cooks spoil the suspense, leaving this story most memorable as another example of MacGregor’s distinctive amalgams of melodrama, parapsychology, and wrenching emotional loss (The Hanged Man, 1998, etc.). (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57566-411-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
A tantalizing, un-put-down-able novel by an instant master of the form.
In a debut novel by the creator of the television show The Killing, a serial killer in Copenhagen targets young mothers as part of a complex scheme that seems to have ties to the apparent murder of government minister Rosa Hartung's 12-year-old daughter, Kristine, a year ago.
The homicidal Chestnut Man, named after the chestnut and matchstick dolls he leaves behind, is a grisly operator who amputates the hands of the women he abducts while they're still alive. A pair of mismatched investigators are reluctantly on the case: Naia Thulin, a local cop who, tired of what she thinks of as "tedious" assignments with Major Crimes, eyes a promotion to the cybercrime unit, and Mark Hess, a disheveled Europol agent on temporary leave from the Hague to serve "penance for some blunder or other." The big complicating factor is the absence of proof that Kristine, who disappeared, is dead; when her fingerprints turn up on the chestnut dolls, hopes stir that she is, in fact, alive. It takes a little time for the novel to set itself apart from other such thrillers. What are the chestnut dolls if not an imitation of the diabolical snowmen in Jo Nesbø's The Snowman? But with its densely layered plot, chilling settings, and multiple suspects with murderous grudges, Sveistrup's epic rises above any such comparisons. This is a page-turner that will make you hesitate before turning the page, so unnerving is the violence. One of the best and scariest crime novels of the year, it adds to its rewards by promising us at least one sequel.
A tantalizing, un-put-down-able novel by an instant master of the form.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-289536-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
The closest thing to an actual hell ride you'll ever experience (one hopes). Thrilling, bloody, and ferocious.
A death-defying Bolivian adventure in the primordial forest...starring a homeless teenager from Boston who just might be a shaman.
Sleeping late isn't an option in the jungle. By the time the sun is up, it's "already ricocheting with the calls of monkeys, parrots, frogs, all going at it molto vivace, shrieking and squawking as if the world were waking up in pain, the jungle giving birth to itself each morning." The setting of Ferencik's (The River at Night, 2017) second female-driven adventure thriller is hair-raisingly vivid, replete with tarantulas, piranhas, jaguars, and electric eels. We experience them all through the eyes of Lily Bushwold, 19, "a half-starved, high strung wild child who lived out of a backpack, homeless since [she] was thirteen." Lily thought she had landed a dream job in South America but arrived to find herself the victim of a scam; she's living on shoplifted bananas in Cochabamba when she meets Omar, a handsome hunter from a remote jungle village who has come to try his luck in the big city. He and Lily have already fallen in love when he learns that his 4-year-old nephew back home has been eaten by a jaguar; when he returns to seek revenge, Lily goes with him. What does she have to lose, right? She finds out pretty quickly during the most terrifying plane flight in recent literary history. After a near crash and a water landing, it's welcome to Ayachero—Omar's jungle home, where everybody except one little cross-eyed boy immediately hates the gringa. "A burnt-meat smell, the reek of stale water, and a stray sweet whiff of pig dung merged with a humid, breathless heat." Among the unwelcoming locals are two missionaries named Harriet and a female shaman named Beya, an outcast from a rival tribe who lives in the woods nearby. When Beya is able to save Lily from death by coaching her telepathically through an electric eel encounter, her next question is, "Are you the only shaman in Boston?" Even with the telepathy, Lily's experience feels almost real—then, in the final chapters, takes a wild turn into superhero territory.
The closest thing to an actual hell ride you'll ever experience (one hopes). Thrilling, bloody, and ferocious.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6892-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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