An engaging novel about a multifaceted investigator who undergoes challenging on-the-job training.
In Diamond’s thriller, a guarded woman slowly opens herself to new possibilities as she deals with a conspiracy.
Thirty-two-year-old Claire Chastain is in a time of transition, which is causing her to run from commitment. Specifically, she’s run away from live-in boyfriend Peter,who made the mistake of thinking about proposing to her. She leaves her high-powered finance job in New York City and returns home to Washington, D.C., where she takes an accounting position for which she’s overqualified. She ostensibly came back to help her cantankerous grandmother Leonamove into an assisted living facility, but Claire’s new life becomes unduly complicated. For one, she’s being followed by a huge man in a 1971 Lincoln Continental. Then she learns that her paranoid friend Gavin was killed in a strange car accident. Finally, at work, Claire receives an odd spreadsheet, apparently as part of an audit of a pharmaceutical company. She soon finds herself being hunted by shadowy forces—and aided by a most unusual guardian angel. Initially, Diamond, the author of To Hell With Johnny Manic (2019), presents a protagonist whom some readers will find difficult to like. But after the author introduces the bitter Leona and reveals details of Claire’s formative years, readers will sympathize with the protagonist’s prickly nature. Importantly, the author has Claire experience some personal growth; specifically, she realizes that she must change her ways in order to thrive—and nudging her in that new direction is the wounded but gritty veteran that someone has hired to protect her. Diamond does a masterful job of unspooling the conspiracy at the heart of the story, and the quickly changing circumstances force Claire to learn how to improvise. (It certainly helps, however, that the bad guys have hired inept thugs to stalk her.) All through the narrative, Claire moves toward a new life path, and it will be intriguing to watch her develop further in planned future outings.
An engaging novel about a multifaceted investigator who undergoes challenging on-the-job training.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73413-922-8
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Stolen Time Press
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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
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