An entertaining and exuberant suspense tale about murderous revenge in the literary world.
A reclusive writer who’s a fugitive fights for his innocence in this detective novel.
Bequette’s third installment of a mystery series is a departure from his typical fare featuring resilient police detective Joe Turner. While Turner pops up sporadically in this volume, it is 30-something American writer Owen Prescott, a Dartmouth graduate from a wealthy family, who steals the spotlight. For over a decade, Prescott has enjoyed a solitary, secluded life of anonymity in the English countryside, far from the woman-chasing, vibrant social life he once relished. Flashback chapters tell the story of a time when Turner was assisting Prescott, who wrote under the pseudonym Ancil Bradford, with Boston book signings in 2013, despite the menacing omnipresence of obsessed stalker Desiree Richins. Desiree’s behavior necessitated a restraining order. That problem became coupled with a lawsuit filed by former creative writing instructor Norvel Anendale against Prescott for plagiarism, claiming he’d co-authored the novelist’s prize-winning bestseller, Orchards of Grace. Neither of those nuisances was enough to spook Prescott from continuing to celebrate his literary success, but he landed in hot water anyway as the lead suspect in Anendale’s violent murder. Soon after, Prescott eluded prosecution by fleeing America for Europe and went into hiding. Fledgling FBI agent Alyssa Wagner revives the cold case (“A native of Boston, Alyssa recalled the Owen Prescott disappearance as a teenager and was immediately intrigued by the idea of bringing the fugitive to justice”). She becomes determined to garner positive attention in her new position with the aid of facial recognition technology. Meanwhile, Prescott has become antsy, yearning for the literary spotlight. He ventures out in public, where freelance journalist Margo Stark spots him and decides to insinuate herself into his life with the intention of writing a career-defining, exclusive feature. As Wagner narrows her search and surveillance, edging closer to apprehending Prescott, the tale is complemented by a generous Boston backstory, chronicling the author’s legal troubles a decade earlier, all running parallel to his present melodrama. The denouement, filled with hidden identities and startling events, is a shocker.
With the amount of characters Bequette incorporates in his novel, the tale is slow to gain narrative momentum and only moves into high gear after all of his players and their assorted backstories are established. The author’s previous headliner, Turner, takes a backseat this time, serving as Prescott’s former literary agent, which may or may not appeal to fans of the series. Nevertheless, Bequette’s prose is reliably crisp and descriptive, and lots of intrigue and suspense are embedded in a thrillingly serpentine story with plenty of twists and turns as Prescott tries to worm his way out of complex litigation. Also captivating is the backstory of Prescott’s longstanding, difficult relationship with his father, particularly during a vividly portrayed duck hunting trip, where shame and trauma mark the writer’s memory of his childhood. In the present, his father attempts to preserve the family name after Prescott has been charged with Anendale’s murder based on DNA evidence at the scene. With its surfeit of subplots and characters, the book eventually coalesces into one big hunt for justice as Prescott attempts to evade his pursuers and a surprise psychotic killer emerges in an ending few readers will predict.
Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: manuscript
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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