A thrilling and tense mystery with electrifying horror, featuring a detective with a heart of gold.
In Jones’ supernatural mystery, the second in a series, a detective touched by the occult investigates the disappearances of 49 women.
Jarek Videni, the intuitive detective, returns to solve an even more gruesome case. He’s in Deadwood, South Dakota, in 1924; over the past 28 years, 49 women have gone missing in a town already brimming with an undercurrent of lawlessness. Deadwood once flourished as a mining town—the gold is long gone, but the tunnels and their secrets remain. Jarek arrives at the Terry Hotel and encounters ghosts desperately seeking to communicate with him as they predict another victim will soon be taken (“ ‘Shhhheee’s neeexxt,’ it said before taking a deep, raspy breath. ‘Shhee’ss neeexxt . . . and she knowsss it’ ”). Also staying at the hotel is Marcus Livingston, a federal agent determined to find answers and stop whatever is taking the women. Jarek was summoned to town via a telegram from his grandmother, Leona Videni, who urged him to keep a close eye on Ulrika Johnston, the maid at the hotel. She is a sweet young woman, the unknowing target of wicked people plotting against her—and against Jarek, as well. The nefarious group is led by a man who believes he can control demons, and Jarek will have to find a strength he didn’t know he had (and pick up some unexpected allies) if he hopes to defeat this evil. The author builds upon the foundation of the series’ previous installment (Chasing Shadows: Genesis, 2022) to develop his historical supernatural milieu and his protagonist, Jarek, as he comes into his own as an investigator and discovers more about himself and his ties to mysterious dark forces. The new characters, particularly Ulrika and Marcus, are engaging, with their own unique characterizations, providing grounding to support the mystery story. The villain is not one to be taken lightly, and Jones creates a great sense of danger and suspense. Overall, this is a fantastic sequel that will delight returning readers.
A thrilling and tense mystery with electrifying horror, featuring a detective with a heart of gold.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9798986344058
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Water Sign Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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