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 vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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