A spooky, gothic setting disrupted by a totally modern heroine.
A woman with dissociative identity disorder finds herself at the site of the childhood trauma that caused her break, fighting for survival against threats both external and internal.
When Kenetria Nash wakes up, she at first has no idea that she’s been dormant for six years. Following an extreme childhood trauma, Ken developed DID in order to cope, and she and her seven “headmates” live in relative harmony within a castle-shaped inner world, though only three of the personalities, including Ken, are truly able to “front” for long periods of time. While Ken has been slumbering, Della and Solomon have been managing, dealing with Covid-19 and an increasingly precarious financial situation. Ken comes back into awareness standing on a dock, waiting for a boat to pick her up and ferry her to her new job as caretaker at an old estate on an abandoned Hudson River island. If this sounds like the setup for a truly strange horror movie—it is. Managing her various selves is the least of Ken’s problems, even as Della seems to have gone missing, because when they reach the estate, the house turns out to look exactly like the interior castle where all the headmates live. Not only has Ken apparently been here before, but soon her caustic ex shows up with his racist, misogynistic father, intent on hosting some kind of bizarre goblin hunting ritual—in a storm, of course. Her only ally is Celeste, who seems to run hot and cold with Ken, but ultimately may be her ticket to surviving the physical challenges ahead. Of course, she also has to deal with the mental challenges, not least of which involves the existence of a new headmate who looks an awful lot like a ghost spotted on the property. If it sounds a little over the top—it is. But there are enough twists and scares and unique elements to keep you reading. Ken can be hard to like sometimes, but she’s easy to root for.
A spooky, gothic setting disrupted by a totally modern heroine.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063114951
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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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