Murder is all in the family in this novel, but the surprise ending lacks punch.
A birthday party on a remote island turns into a series of bizarre murders.
“I was born with a broken heart” is how the title character and narrator of this murder mystery opens her story. Daisy is happy, however, to be celebrating the 80th birthday of her beloved nana, Beatrice Darker. Nana is a children’s author who several decades ago made a fortune on a book titled Daisy Darker’s Little Secret. Her family gathers for the birthday party at Seaglass, Beatrice’s eccentric old house on the Cornish coast, on an isolated island at the bottom of a cliff that’s only accessible at low tide. It’s a family affair: Beatrice’s son, Frank Darker, a globe-trotting classical musician who was often absent when his children were growing up; Nancy, his ex-wife and the coldly critical mother of those children; and Daisy’s two older sisters, beautiful and brainy Rose and vain and lazy Lily. Also on the island are Lily’s teenage daughter, Trixie (whose paternity is unknown), and Conor Kennedy, whom Beatrice took in when he was a neighbor boy abused by his father; he’s now a successful journalist. As the tide cuts off the house from the mainland, Beatrice serves a feast and then announces the reading of her will—a reading that makes almost everyone in the family unhappy. Then someone in the small group is found dead in a pool of blood. Soon bodies are stacking up, each killed in a strikingly personal manner, and the dwindling number of living people are frantically trying to identify the killer. (No calling for help—there’s no cell service, and Beatrice has stopped paying her landline bill.) Between the murders, Daisy fills us in on everyone’s backstory, which sometimes bogs down the suspense. If this all sounds a little like Agatha Christie’s bestseller And Then There Were None, that’s probably no accident. But this tale has a different twist ending that, despite some clever construction throughout the book, doesn’t quite convince.
Murder is all in the family in this novel, but the surprise ending lacks punch.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-84393-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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