McDermid keeps all three of these pots simmering, raising the heat in agonizingly tiny increments, until she’s ready for a...
Back on the job as head of the newly formed regional Major Incident Team, DCI Carol Jordan (Splinter the Silence, 2015, etc.) is tested to the max by the Wedding Killer.
The motive for inoffensive office manager Kathryn McCormick’s murder couldn’t be more prosaic. The killer, who posed as a wedding guest to engage her in conversation before he dated her, drugged her, strangled her, left her car on an isolated road, and set it afire with her inside, was just using her as a placeholder for the amatory and business partner who’d left him after meeting a more suitable mate at a wedding she’d attended alone. The lack of an obvious connection between the murderer and his victim, coupled with his skill in avoiding any forensic evidence, makes it impossible for DCI Carol Jordan, clinical psychologist Tony Hill, and the rest of the ReMIT to come up with any suspects. It also makes it easy for the killer to keep on crashing weddings, cultivating pitiably vulnerable new acquaintances, and taking secondhand revenge on them. Things get even worse for Carol, already tormented by guilt over the unexpectedly far-reaching legal corner-cutting that made it possible for her return to work after she failed a Breathalyzer test, when crime correspondent Penny Burgess makes it her mission to get the evidence that will end Carol’s career. Nor are things going much better for DS Paula McIntyre, whom Carol urges to sign up for the inspector’s exam so she can take over when Carol steps down, as she may have to do any minute: Torin McAndrew, whom she and her partner, Dr. Elinor Blessing, took in as their ward after his mother was murdered, is suddenly acting a lot more skittish and secretive than other teenagers, and there’s a depressingly good reason why.
McDermid keeps all three of these pots simmering, raising the heat in agonizingly tiny increments, until she’s ready for a finale guaranteed to leave you reeling.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2716-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
The laboriously manufactured drama yields so little payout that you may feel more manipulated than intrigued.
The disappearance of two teenage girls from a religious summer camp haunts their co-counselors and draws them back to the scene to learn what really happened.
All of Rev. Jeremiah Dalton’s Camp Horseshoe is in an uproar when two counselors go missing, one after the other. First it’s Elle Brady, the beautiful but melancholy girlfriend of Jeremiah’s son, Lucas. Elle hasn’t been herself the past few weeks. Could it be because Lucas has been spending time with another counselor, Bernadette Alsace, or perhaps the fact that she's pregnant, a secret that led her to consider taking her own life on the first page of the book? Readers who follow Elle’s torments will see her choose to live just in time to get pushed off a cliff. But that’s only the first of the shifts Jackson (Expecting to Die, 2017, etc.) makes between numerous protagonists past and present, a device designed to build drama that also tests readers’ attention and patience. After Elle disappears, another counselor, Monica, soon follows. In a story echoing Elle’s, readers learn that Monica is pregnant, too, after having had sex with a counselor named Tyler, and then she vanishes in a chapter that leaves her fate unclear. Tyler’s girlfriend, queen bee Jo-Beth Chancellor, may have had something to do with it, though the mystery appears to haunt all the characters. Some 20 years later, the original counselors plan to meet and discuss the night of Monica’s disappearance to get their stories straight, though many of them, like the reader, don’t seem quite clear on what they’re trying to hide.
The laboriously manufactured drama yields so little payout that you may feel more manipulated than intrigued.Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61773-466-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
Another harrowing nightmare by a master of the sleepless night.
An online project to trace the fates of missing persons and unidentified murder victims bears poisonous fruit for two women it brings together.
Everyone involved in the Doe Pages has their reasons—civic-mindedness, moral outrage, obsessive curiosity—for the interest they share in gathering information about the anonymous parties whose photos they pore over. Alice Fine’s reason sets her apart. Taken from her home when she was only 3, she was lucky enough to be rescued by her father, a police officer in Victorville, Indiana, apparently before anything terrible happened. In the generation that’s passed since then, Harrison Fine has quit the force, moved to Chicago, been widowed, and become the can-do junior partner in the contracting firm of King and Fine, where Alice is working in a meaningless hanger-on position the day she’s scanning the contents of the Doe Pages and spots the photograph of the man she’s convinced was her kidnapper. By the time Alice catches up with Richard Miller, she and a pair of her online buddies have uncovered evidence that he lived many lives before the last one came to an end when he was stabbed 12 times. One of these lives, Rader-Day (Under a Dark Sky, 2018, etc.) begins hinting early on, involved Merrily Cruz, who knew Miller as Richard Kisel, the man so close to her mother for so long that he was practically her stepfather, the man who on her 30th birthday leaves her a text message—“Hey, kid, it’s best if I don’t bother you anymore. Have a good life”—that so interests state trooper Graciano “Gonzo” Vasquez that it pretty much guarantees that “Rick Kisel was going to ruin their lives, all over again.” The ensuing developments send both heroines spinning down converging rabbit holes to their dimly remembered pasts until Alice concludes, “She was in Wonderland.” It’s not a pretty place.
Another harrowing nightmare by a master of the sleepless night.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293807-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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