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
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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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