A fast-paced, intricate, and atmospheric mystery that introduces a plucky, engaging detective.
Detective Natalie Lockhart seeks to solve the brutal murder of a friend—which may connect to the slaying of her own sister 20 years earlier.
Centuries ago, three women were executed for witchcraft in Burning Lake, New York. Perhaps because of this violent history, it’s almost a rite of passage for Burning Lake teens to flirt with Wicca and darker forms of witchcraft. But when a high school teacher is found murdered in her home, the exploration doesn’t seem quite so innocent, especially when a poppet, a kind of black magic voodoo doll, is found buried in the teacher’s garden. Natalie can feel the dark influence everywhere; in addition to the murder investigation, she’s been assigned to investigate the disappearances of nine transients over the past several years. When she discovers the desiccated corpses of tortured crows at more than one of the sites where the missing people were last seen, it becomes more and more obvious that there is something—or someone—dark and deadly at work in Burning Lake, someone who may even have been responsible for the murder of Natalie’s own sister 20 years before and who hasn’t stopped killing since. There are a number of crimes being investigated in this novel and a lot of movement between past and present, but for the most part, Blanchard (A Breath After Drowning, 2018, etc.) successfully navigates these complexities and keeps the reader, and the story, grounded with the appealing character of Natalie. Dogged, empathetic, courageous, and driven by her own childhood trauma, she leaves no stone unturned, even if it means investigating people she loves. Blanchard indicates this is the first of many Lockhart mysteries to come—good news!
A fast-paced, intricate, and atmospheric mystery that introduces a plucky, engaging detective.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-20571-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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