Colson’s fifth (The Forsaken, 2014, etc.) is another wild ride for a flawed, valiant hero who’s impossible to dislike.
The sheriff of Tibbehah County, Mississippi, is out of a job but not out of trouble.
When former Army Ranger Quinn Colson became sheriff, he cleaned up drug gangs, solved murders old and new, and helped the county recover from a devastating tornado. But he didn’t win re-election or bring down his archenemy, Johnny Stagg, whose legal businesses are just a cover for a vast network of corruption and criminal activities. There are hopeful signs, though. Stagg’s efforts to bribe incoming sheriff Rusty Wise are going nowhere, and his new right-hand man, Ringold, is actually an FBI agent working with Colson to bring him down. Colson and deputy Lillie Virgil have just hauled Colson’s troubled sister, Caddy, out of a Memphis crack house and into a rehab facility. Lillie’s problems go back to her childhood and the recent murder of the man she loved, whose killer Colson is still seeking. Meantime, a couple of good old boys plot to steal a bundle from local lumber-mill owner Larry Cobb with the help of an Alabama safecracker and his dumb, football-crazed nephew. Mickey Walls hates Cobb, his ex-father-in-law, and enlists his friend Kyle to work with the burglars while he establishes an alibi. Unable to open the safe, the luckless crew hauls it away, attracting the attention of a deputy who’s wounded by the nephew. Along with money and jewels, the safe contains the detailed books Cobb kept of all his crooked dealings, details that could ruin political careers and send many to jail. Colson is left pondering his future job possibilities, his continuing romance with his high school sweetheart (who’s just split with her husband), and his relationship with his long-absent father. But unless he and Lillie clean up the latest crimes, he may not live to worry about his future.
Colson’s fifth (The Forsaken, 2014, etc.) is another wild ride for a flawed, valiant hero who’s impossible to dislike.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-17394-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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