This gripping, kaleidoscopic crime novel has a gritty tone infused with plangent emotion.
The search for a missing girl gives blighted lives hope for redemption in this haunting verse novel.
George’s story centers on the romance between Bad Boy—a ne’er-do-well who robs pharmacies and joyrides around the town of Hollow Rock, Tennessee—and his 15-year-old girlfriend Alison, whose grandmother has threatened to shoot him. After a season of furtive, passionate trysts, Alison dumps him for a local meth-head, which leads to violence and to Bad Boy taking Alison against her will across the Mississippi to West Memphis, Arkansas; she finally escapes him at the Flying J truck stop and is last seen jumping into the cab of a random trucker who drives off with her. The novel then shifts to the perspective of “the Chaplain,” an ex-con who stages Christian revival meetings in a tent backed by a band featuring Debbie, a former sex worker, on drums. The Chaplain’s sermons stress that no one is too sinful and low to be forgiven and saved by Jesus, a proposition that’s challenged by a sinister trucker who announces his own unforgiveable sin: killing a girl. The Chaplain and his band fall in with a female trucker who witnessed the Flying J incident, retrieved the pink sneaker Alison left on the tarmac, and has been putting up missing-persons posters with Alison’s picture wherever she goes; at one of the Chaplain’s meetings, the sinister trucker comes onto her radar as a likely suspect in Alison’s disappearance. The stories of Ruth, the trucker’s sister who recalls his disturbing childhood behavior, and the West Memphis police detective who shrugs off Alison’s disappearance but gets pulled in deeper, are also braided into the narrative.
The story unfolds in a perfectly rendered, hardscrabble South seen through the eyes of working-class people with industrial-strength vehicles navigating an archipelago of strip malls and truck plazas connected by roaring interstates and shadowy county roads. George writes in a poetic meter as supple as the most naturalistic prose; the writing is grounded in plain, earthy English but has a musicality that makes it feel like a biblical parable or a hillbilly highwayman’s ballad. (“A dustball cheapskate town and Broad / Street much the way is just two lanes, / which goes to show you what broad counts / for here—and Hollow Rock is Nowhere / Tennessee, but, like they say, / it’s home.”) The author writes about tawdry lives riddled with bad decisions, but finds a lyrical beauty in them. (“A girl like Alison you don’t / find at the Carroll County Fair. / She’s like a light you see at night / too low on the horizon and / you think you see an airplane crashing—you listen for the sound and hear / none, turn on the TV and there’s / no news, and then you wonder what / you saw and did you even see it?— / something bright and terrible, / the beauty hurts your eyes, you only / wish you’d see it once again.”) Readers will be captivated by George’s dark, hallucinatory vision and gorgeous language.
This gripping, kaleidoscopic crime novel has a gritty tone infused with plangent emotion.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781604893717
Page Count: 216
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.
After being released from prison, a young woman tries to reconnect with her 5-year-old daughter despite having killed the girl’s father.
Kenna didn’t even know she was pregnant until after she was sent to prison for murdering her boyfriend, Scotty. When her baby girl, Diem, was born, she was forced to give custody to Scotty’s parents. Now that she’s been released, Kenna is intent on getting to know her daughter, but Scotty’s parents won’t give her a chance to tell them what really happened the night their son died. Instead, they file a restraining order preventing Kenna from so much as introducing herself to Diem. Handsome, self-assured Ledger, who was Scotty’s best friend, is another key adult in Diem’s life. He’s helping her grandparents raise her, and he too blames Kenna for Scotty’s death. Even so, there’s something about her that haunts him. Kenna feels the pull, too, and seems to be seeking Ledger out despite his judgmental behavior. As Ledger gets to know Kenna and acknowledges his attraction to her, he begins to wonder if maybe he and Scotty’s parents have judged her unfairly. Even so, Ledger is afraid that if he surrenders to his feelings, Scotty’s parents will kick him out of Diem’s life. As Kenna and Ledger continue to mourn for Scotty, they also grieve the future they cannot have with each other. Told alternatively from Kenna’s and Ledger’s perspectives, the story explores the myriad ways in which snap judgments based on partial information can derail people’s lives. Built on a foundation of death and grief, this story has an undercurrent of sadness. As usual, however, the author has created compelling characters who are magnetic and sympathetic enough to pull readers in. In addition to grief, the novel also deftly explores complex issues such as guilt, self-doubt, redemption, and forgiveness.
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2560-7
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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