Haunting and powerful, this dark little gem of a novel is an absolute must-read.
Hardy’s debut novel, a fusion of gothic horror, mystery, and supernatural fiction, focuses on women dealing with profound loss and loneliness.
The story begins as police interview Eddy Sparrow for reasons that aren’t immediately clear to the reader.Eddy is a woman whose recently deceased mother—chair of the history department at Georgia State University—was sent a manuscript before her death that was found buried in a canister in the backyard of an abandoned estate. The property, located in northern Alabama, was allegedly haunted, as was the manuscript, which is rumored to curse anyone who reads it. As Eddy talks to the police officer in her home over tea, she shares the heartrending story recounted in the manuscript, which chronicles the tragic life of Cat, who lived on the estate with her mother, Sarah, and her mother’s cheating boyfriend, Ray—“the man who ate [Sarah] from the inside until there was nothing left.” Watching her mother be physically and emotionally abused by Ray while helpless to stop it, Cat is devastated when her mother dies; compounding her grief, the courts send the minor back to the house to live with her mother’s abuser. Parts of the manuscript include excerpts from Sarah’s journal, which includes horrific revelations and charts her descent into madness at the end of her life. The innovative structure of the narrative—a journal within a manuscript within a police interrogation—works well to keep the reader turning pages, and the impressively deep character development makes the cast members feel authentic, identifiable, and emotionally dimensional—particularly in the case of Cat and her intense relationship with her mother. The mystery surrounding Cat’s mother’s death is kept tantalizing beyond reach until the very last pages, where bombshell plot twists will have readers picking their collective jaws up off the floor. But it’s the creepy atmospherics and the author’s dark, lyrical writing style that makes the story so unforgettable: Hardy describes an old well covered with rotting wood planks at its center as a “huge mouth that drank in the darkness.”
Haunting and powerful, this dark little gem of a novel is an absolute must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781960018533
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Running Wild Press
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
