Though the mystery is slight and the windup unsatisfying, it’s wonderful to see Tapply get out of the city and into an...
After 20 cases starring Boston lawyer Brady Coyne (Shadow of Death, 2003, etc.), Tapply introduces a more outdoorsy, elemental Down East detective.
Stoney Calhoun knows he was named after Stonewall Jackson and grew up in Beaumont, South Carolina, but he doesn’t know much else about his past. A lightning bolt, if that’s really what it was, left him deaf in one ear, unable to drink alcohol, and pretty much devoid of memories before a stint in the veterans’ hospital that ended when he followed an obscure sense that he was being called home to rural Maine. Moving swiftly to put down roots, he got a job in Kate Balaban’s bait-and-tackle shop and commenced the world’s most discreet affair with his boss, unmolested except by the occasional inquisitive emissary of Uncle Sam. All that changes the day Fred Green, a blowhard from Key Largo, appears in Kate’s looking for a guide. Disliking him on sight, Stoney palms him off instead on grad student Lyle McMahan, then suffers the tortures of the damned when both men disappear and Lyle turns up dead. Despite Kate’s protests, he insists on helping York County Sheriff Dickman with his slow-moving investigation and ends up endangering himself and everyone he’s closest to.
Though the mystery is slight and the windup unsatisfying, it’s wonderful to see Tapply get out of the city and into an altogether different kind of time that suits his unhurried storytelling perfectly.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2004
ISBN: 1-59228-435-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
Gardner tacks on so many twists that even the most astute reader will be confused, and even the intriguing resolution, when...
A New Hampshire cop tries to piece together a mysterious woman’s life following a car accident and discovers nothing is as it seems.
Gardner (Fear Nothing, 2014, etc.) puts Sgt. Wyatt Foster front and center in this overly complicated thriller, while corporate security expert—and Foster’s new girlfriend—Tessa Leoni, from the 2011 Love You More, plays a distant second fiddle. When Foster is called to a single-car accident on a rural road, it seems like driver Nicole Frank simply drank too much Scotch and drove off the road. But Nicole, who miraculously survives the crash, insists that her daughter, Vero, is still missing. Foster and his team launch a massive search until Nicole’s husband, Thomas, arrives at the hospital and tells the police that there is no child: Nicole suffered a traumatic brain injury (actually several), causing her to conjure an imaginary daughter. As the details of Nicole’s original injury—she suspiciously fell down both her basement and front stairs within the span of a few months—emerge, Foster and the reader become more, rather than less, confused. Nicole’s history unspools in calculated sound bites, with each episode ending in an artificial cliffhanger. According to Nicole—who claims to be “the woman who died twice”—she escaped a horrific childhood in a brothel known as the Dollhouse, a place that’s the nexus of the mystery surrounding Vero, who may or may not be a figment of her addled brain.
Gardner tacks on so many twists that even the most astute reader will be confused, and even the intriguing resolution, when it finally comes, doesn’t answer all the plot’s unnecessary questions.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95456-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Chilling.
A glaciologist seeks refuge in Antarctica.
A nearly two-year stint at the British Antarctic Survey’s base on South Georgia Island, halfway between the Antarctic mainland and the Falklands, seems like the perfect job for Cambridge graduate Felicity Lloyd. The landscape is breathtaking, the wildlife like no other in the world, and ever changing glaciers provide vital opportunities to investigate the effects of climate change on humankind’s future. But Felicity has another secret reason for choosing to pursue her professional passion in what may be the most remote place on Earth. She hopes that Freddie, who’s stalked her nearly her whole adult life, will never find her there. The trouble is, she can’t remember much about Freddie or the reason for his obsession with her; her memories are jumbled and distorted, with chunks of time missing from her consciousness the size of the icebergs she studies. Dr. Joe Grant, the psychologist she sees in Cambridge, tries to help her recover her lost moments, but just when he seems to be getting close, Felicity shuts him down, preferring to work out her problems alone in the frigid south. Leaving Felicity to handle her issues on her own, however, may no longer be an option for Joe once his mother, DI Delilah Jones, begins to connect the deaths of some of Cambridge’s homeless to Felicity’s blackouts. Bolton (The Craftsman, 2018, etc.) provides her readers with shivers worthy of her setting, although true aficionados of the psychological thriller may find the secret of Felicity’s illness a bit too easy to recognize.
Chilling.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-30005-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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