At the heart of this multicorpse thriller is a love that dare not say its name. Come on out, Jane.
Former classmates at Oxford’s MFA writing program become locked in a vicious death match at a Manhattan writers conference.
Sutanto’s campy thriller follows two successful YA novels and a cozy mystery (among other books) and shows the marks of both genres, with confessional, in-your-face, first-person narration and minimal gore, well off-screen. It begins when Jane Morgan, an unhappy midlist writer of what she calls “lit fic,” learns that her former classmate (crush, obsession, idol, muse—all of the above) Thalia Ashcroft has hit the bestseller list with a thriller that seems to be partly based on their friendship. Despite their initial intense closeness, Thalia and Jane became estranged after a mysterious incident their first year, and while Jane came back to finish, Thalia never did. Now Jane, mired in a dull marriage to a dull man, with an equally uninspiring career, is determined to reconnect with Thalia and jump-start her life. When she learns that her old friend will be appearing at SusPens Con in New York City, she pawns some apparently stolen jewelry to pay for a plane ticket and hotel room and plows ahead despite the fact that husband Ted insists on tagging along and her literary agency won’t help her get into the show. Jane reveals early on her self-diagnosis: “Pretty sure I’m a sociopath. I’m not ashamed of it; in fact it’s something I quite like, and I carry the thought in the recesses of my mind like a lucky charm, returning to it the way one might stroke a rabbit-foot once in a while.” In fact, the reason the American Jane chose England for her graduate studies is that it’s considered the third rudest, most unfriendly place in the world (after Russia and France), and life in sunny California is driving her to constant thoughts of mayhem and murder. The plot in both present and past is quite silly, but crazy stalker Jane is kind of fun. Her self-knowledge seems limited, however—despite swoony sexual fantasies about Thalia, she continues to believe she’s not attracted to women. When the point of view switches in the second half, with supporting characters streaming in and twists piling on twists piling on twists, some eye-rolling may ensue. On the other hand, Sutanto’s renderings of Jane’s Chinese Indonesian heritage and her experience at Oxford, both autobiographically based, are strong.
At the heart of this multicorpse thriller is a love that dare not say its name. Come on out, Jane.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2023
ISBN: 9780593546918
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
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