A rollicking, Western-flavored frightfest.
Werewolves and worse haunt the Arizona desert in this supernatural thriller.
Bailey’s yarn, the second installment of his Curtis Jefferson trilogy, braids together loosely connected episodes involving macabre goings-on in rural southern Arizona, circa 1964. Framing the novel is the story of Curtis Jefferson, a Black teenager unjustly imprisoned for arson in the Fort Grant reform school, the former site of a U.S. Army outpost where 144 Apache women and children were massacred by vigilantes in 1871. Among the challenges Curtis faces are a violent, racist fellow inmate, periodic stampedes of ghost riders, and a werewolf that lunges at him when he briefly manages to escape. Meanwhile, local cafe owner Isabel Cienfuegos confronts similar problems. Her nephew Rayis a metal sculptor who’s crafting a coyote-themed memorial, commissioned by a mysterious Apache medicine man named Ezra; meanwhile, she has repeated run-ins with the werewolf who’s skulking about her restaurant—including an attempted rape. A third subplot concerns Pima policeman Eduardo Cruz and paralegal Betty Wood, who are trying to prove the innocence of Kenny Armenta, a catatonic man in a psychiatric ward who’s accused of tearing out his wife’s throat. Around the little-known real-life tragedy of the Camp Grant massacre, Bailey spins a colorful, intricate fictional world, steeped in well-observed Southwestern atmosphere and teeming with paranormal oddballs—including a headless lawyer who gallantly drives to the rescue of distressed people in his black Lincoln Continental and a squad of very, very old cavalrymen who still draw paychecks. This is not the spookiest of tales; the supernatural elements are matter-of-fact, and the horror flows more from grisly shock effects than from suspense. However, the characters are sharply drawn and vibrant, especially Ezra, whose infectious zest for deviltry (“Ah, the sound of human wailing and the gnashing of teeth—sweet music to my ears”) dominates the proceedings—although he meets his match in captivating spitfire Isabel. Bailey’s vigorous, if sometimes purplish, prose will keep readers turning pages: “Zombie equestrians—a murderous posse on a mission from hell—were abroad again in the night!”
A rollicking, Western-flavored frightfest.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73284-365-3
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Ingramelliott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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