A gripping, multilayered crime novel depicting the drama and trauma along the U.S./Mexican border.
A deputy and a forensic anthropologist join forces to investigate bones found on a Texas ranch in Barker’s crime thriller.
A Texas rancher calls local police after his dog brings him a human bone. He directs Deputy Hondo Velazquez, just a year on the job, to a spot where a “death spiral” of vultures has been circling. Hondo uncovers a number of bones, as well as a crudely made toy bunny. The sheriff and his team arrive to gather up the remains—likely the bones of migrants who died crossing the border—for mass burial, a routine task in the area. Hondo, however, can’t shake that something is wrong; he feels an affinity for the migrants, as his mother was one and he still has family back in Mexico. He sneaks some of the bones to Baylor University forensic anthropologist Magnolia Moss, who runs a program to identify migrant skeletal remains collected from border town cemeteries. After Magnolia finds a bullet in a skull that she examines, Hondo invites her along on an investigation that includes encounters with a menacing female cartel enforcer in Mexico and brutish border patrol cops. Finally, discoveries back at the ranch (and in a nearby silo) reveal horrible truths and provide a closure of sorts for Hondo. The author, a screenwriter, brings rich cinematic dimensions to his fiction debut, making the most of the bleak Texas landscape (cue the vultures) and crafting a Bogart-like existential hero for our times: “The border brought out the worst in people. In the way he’d learned the Wild West had. Which was, in his mind, the very origins of the conflict he found himself immersed within.” This character’s eloquent thoughts, and Barker’s development of his key characters’ various demons and backstories, serve to enhance the suspenseful narrative, which culminates in a masterful final cross-cutting sequence and shootout.
A gripping, multilayered crime novel depicting the drama and trauma along the U.S./Mexican border.Pub Date: July 24, 2023
ISBN: 9798988512417
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Wildbound
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Expert, but unsurprising.
The death of an old friend who was more than a friend sends Dr. Kay Scarpetta down her latest rabbit hole.
If every body tells a story, the corpse of 7-year-old Luna Briley sings the blues. On top of the many signs of ongoing physical abuse, there’s the fatal gunshot wound to her head. Ryder and Piper Briley, the wealthy and powerful parents who didn’t call the police until after their daughter died, insist that Luna’s death was an accident, or maybe a suicide. Scarpetta doesn’t think so, and her refusal to release the body to the Brileys’ hand-picked mortician moves them to legal action against her as Virginia’s chief medical examiner. You’d think it would be a relief to put this case aside for another when Scarpetta’s niece, Secret Service agent Lucy Farinelli, calls her and ferries her by helicopter to an abandoned Oz theme park owned by Ryder Briley, but this one’s even more heartbreaking. Scarpetta is there to examine the body of astrophysicist Sal Giordano, her close friend and former lover, who was evidently kidnapped, held in captivity for several hours, and tossed out of an unidentified aircraft. The leading suspects are the Brileys; Carrie Grethen, Lucy’s sociopathic ex-lover, with whom Scarpetta has repeatedly tangled in the past; and the UFO that dumped Giordano’s body without leaving the usual traces for air-traffic technologies to pick up. The multiple rounds of physical examinations Scarpetta conducts on both victims are every bit as meticulous and gripping as fans would expect; the killer’s identity is neither surprising nor interesting, but Cornwell juggles her trademark forensics, and the paranormal hints she’s become increasingly invested in, more dexterously than usual.
Expert, but unsurprising.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781538770382
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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