Fiercely feminist and viscerally terrifying.
As a blizzard rages outside, a woman and her young children try to elude a home invader.
It’s midnight, and a mother has just gotten her frightened 5-year-old son back to sleep when she hears an unexpected “wheeze of weight” on the stairs. She sees a tall stranger slink onto the landing. He’s wearing plastic gloves and his grinning face is uncovered, indicating he doesn’t intend to leave evidence or witnesses, and his sneakers are dry despite the storm, suggesting he’s planned ahead and expects to stay a while. He misses her watching from the shadows, instead making a beeline for the 1722 New England colonial’s modern addition, but that also means he now separates her from her phone, computer, car, and gun. Few options remain, so she scoops up her son, rouses and hushes her 8-year-old daughter, and creeps downstairs. Long ago, someone walled in their beehive oven’s “messy flues,” leaving an empty space accessible via a hidden panel. The trio slips inside, hoping the intruder will get frustrated and flee, but he makes himself comfortable and starts trying to break them. With school preemptively canceled and the nearest neighbors half a mile away through feet of snow, nobody can save them but her. Straddling the line between psychological thriller and domestic horror, Sierra’s auspicious debut immediately plunges readers headlong into its unnamed protagonist’s waking nightmare. The tense, emotionally resonant close-third-person narrative intercuts the man’s relentless assault with the woman’s own self-recriminations, imagined in her absent husband’s hypercritical voice. Well-timed flashbacks add context and poignancy.
Fiercely feminist and viscerally terrifying.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780593654767
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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