A moody, grisly thriller that supplies a nuanced cast and unresolved mysteries.
A series of evil murders haunt a longtime FBI agent in this eerie prequel.
Ranseen provides background for readers of author Ranseen’s Game of Twins three-volume series. The good news is that it isn’t necessary to have read the later books in the series to enjoy this one; it uses a primarily separate cast and is set about 60 years in the past. The titular character is FBI Special Agent Derbert Hinke, who in 1950 is tasked by J. Edgar Hoover to investigate the gruesome deaths of twins in New Canaan, Connecticut. Communist banners were left with the girls’ bodies, and Hoover, who saw the world through red-colored glasses, wants Derbert to find the Commie connection. Derbert was plucked from obscurity by Helen Gandy, Hoover’s longtime secretary, who becomes Derbert’s older lover. Derbert determines there’s something more vile than Communism behind the ritualistic murders. But that case goes cold. It flares back up in 1973 and 1974 when the aging Derbert discovers disappearances of twins in Alabama and Georgia (Ranseen makes that jump decades into the future without disrupting the narrative). Derbert also learns that he’s been playing a rigged game that he wasn’t ever meant to win. Sadly, that’s the built-in disappointment of this installment. Since the Game of Twins is still being played in the later two thrillers, it’s obvious that Derbert was destined to lose, and kudos to Ranseen for defying reader expectations for his lead. Ranseen does a masterful job of painting fully realized settings, whether that’s snobbish Connecticut during the Red Scare or the rural South just after desegregation. He also skillfully introduces characters with connections to the series’ later volumes. The author’s biggest success is making the reader want to pick up the other two books in his series to see if good ever triumphs in the game.
A moody, grisly thriller that supplies a nuanced cast and unresolved mysteries.Pub Date: July 1, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 311
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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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