This agile thriller makes doing the right thing both nerve-wracking and exciting.
In this novel, a disenchanted man discovers he can go home again—but will he face a killer there?
McGlothlin introduces readers to John Kelton. Not ready to enter the family lumber business, John becomes a teacher in North Carolina. But after his father, Marvin, dies in a hunting accident, John heads home to Watauga, Tennessee. Also returning is his status-driven older brother, Mark, who has been estranged from their father. While John inherited Marvin’s liquid assets, Mark inherited 90% of the timber company. A local coal company with a questionable reputation has made an above-value offer for the business, and Mark is eager to accept and leave town. But John resolves to find a way to buy out Mark and preserve the local economy. His only ally is Elisa Endrizzi, a pretty broker helping him to raise the needed capital. John also finds his father’s death to be suspicious, but he can’t get anyone to believe him, starting with the local sheriff. The harder John pushes, the more he gets trapped in a conspiracy. At one point, he is jailed as a suspect in the death of his father’s flaky girlfriend. But John is determined to solve the mystery of Marvin’s death while simultaneously saving his family’s legacy and staying alive. In this complex mystery, McGlothlin successfully plays long-term corporate responsibility against short-term greed. Although no business executive, John wants to assist those living in his hometown while others profiting from the timber company, initially including his brother, are less concerned with the residents’ fates. John doesn’t help himself by throwing around half-cocked accusations, making enemies of those whose aid he might need. He quickly becomes the boy who cried wolf. But by kicking over every rock, he may eventually get to the truth. Unfortunately, none of the secondary characters are as well drawn as John, Elisa, and Mark. But McGlothlin skillfully muddies the waters with many suspects benefitting from Marvin’s death, which in part results in John’s scorched-earth approach. The story’s biggest drawback is that the true culprit becomes apparent far too soon. Still, the author’s fast-paced narrative makes this taut tale a quick, enjoyable read.
This agile thriller makes doing the right thing both nerve-wracking and exciting.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A promising blueprint for a book that didn’t quite get written.
When their father dies on the cliffs of his California estate, estranged half-siblings unite to investigate possible foul play.
As Dave’s seventh novel opens, the reader learns something the characters don’t know: Hotel magnate Liam Noone did not fall by accident. He was pushed—by whom and for what reason are unclear. The police have deemed it an accident and closed the case, but his son, Sam, is not so sure. Though he hasn’t seen his half sister, Nora, in years, he shows up at her workplace in New York to ask her to go with him to California to investigate. This part of the story is told by Nora in the first person. We get a lot of information about Nora—she has recently lost both parents, she’s an authority on neuroarchitecture, she is engaged to a New York chef but has an ex in the wings—but somehow don’t get much of a feel for her as a person as she and Sam race around investigating leads and having defensive, snappy conversations. A second narrative thread begins 50 years in the past and follows the development of a romance between Liam and a woman named Cory, who is not one of his three ex-wives, nor is she a woman named Cece with whom he had a mysterious connection. The novel relies on the tension created by all these missing puzzle pieces to plunge swiftly forward, but there’s nothing really at stake—no strong suspects, no wrongly accused, no contested inheritance; it’s all just digging up the secrets of a dead person so his children can understand him now that it’s too late. Actually, nobody really understands each other in this book, and as the characters suspiciously keep each other at arm’s length, the effect extends to the reader as well. Other potentially interesting topics—neuroarchitecture (designing spaces that support emotional well-being), the high-end hotel business—are similarly set up but not explored.
A promising blueprint for a book that didn’t quite get written.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781668002933
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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