Despite the colder weather, this slice of Nordic noir reads surprisingly like top-line American procedurals.
The apparent kidnapping of a schoolboy kicks off a second grim outing for Det. Erik Schäfer and investigative journalist Heloise Kaldan.
Heloise thinks she’s having a really bad day when she goes to see Dr. Jens Bjerre to confirm her in-home pregnancy test and get help securing an abortion. She’s distressed to find that her troubles, serious as they are, are jolted into perspective when she hears Bjerre get a phone call that informs him that his son has gone missing from Copenhagen’s Nyholm School. In fact, it turns out that no one’s seen 10-year-old Lukas Bjerre since his father dropped him off that morning, several precious hours ago, and that he could have been spirited far away in the meantime. A reported sighting of Lukas’ corpse in a frozen moat leads only to the recovery of his jacket, whose bloodstains and traces of rat poison hint at a dark story. Erik and his colleagues in the Violent Crimes Unit work every lead, and they’re both horrified and frustrated when the DNA found in the blood on Lukas’ jacket leads them to a man who was shot to death very shortly after the boy’s disappearance, or maybe even before. As Hancock shows the dragnet widening to include an ever wider array of characters, her story threatens to lose focus. But though it lacks the unforgiving intensity of The Corpse Flower (2021), Erik and Heloise’s memorable debut, it closes the circle with a suitably nightmarish snap.
Despite the colder weather, this slice of Nordic noir reads surprisingly like top-line American procedurals.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63910-117-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An entertaining thriller if you can give yourself over to its sillier plot devices.
Sager returns with his take on a gothic whodunit set on the coast of Maine.
The year is 1983. Kit McDeere is a disgraced home caregiver who has one chance to redeem herself: She's assigned to look after the ailing, elderly Lenora Hope, a local Lizzie Borden figure. Back in 1929, Lenora allegedly murdered her parents and sister, and now, along with her remaining staff, she resides at Hope’s End, the Gothic mansion on Maine’s crumbling cliffs where the murders took place. Lenora can't speak following a series of strokes, but with Kit’s help, she can type, and she wants to tell her story once and for all, confiding in Kit what happened on the night of the infamous murders. The novel moves between Kit’s narration in the present and Lenora’s typewritten account of her life leading up to the incident. Early on, the novel evokes such genre classics as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Rebecca, establishing a moody atmosphere and intriguingly suspicious characters. However, this novel lacks the psychological realism of its influences. Sager doesn’t play with gothic tropes so much as he simply traffics in them. The first half of the book is tense and propulsive, but in later chapters the narrative takes so many outlandish turns so quickly that it borders on camp. Characters act in ways that are clichéd and implausible, and they are given cartoonish dialogue to match their behavior. Villains confess easily, in long speeches that strain credulity, and a subplot around paternity takes on the flavor of a telenovela. Multiple scenes involve characters emerging from doorways to reveal they were there all along. (Gasp!) That said, the novel reads quickly and provides a thrilling, if goofy, ride for those with a high tolerance for plot hijinks and a fondness for Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak.
An entertaining thriller if you can give yourself over to its sillier plot devices.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9780593183229
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.
A much-beloved author gives a favorite recurring character her own novel.
Holly Gibney made her first appearance in print with a small role in Mr. Mercedes (2014). She played a larger role in The Outsider (2018). And she was the central character in If It Bleeds, a novella in the 2020 collection of the same name. King has said that the character “stole his heart.” Readers adore her, too. One way to look at this book is as several hundred pages of fan service. King offers a lot of callbacks to these earlier works that are undoubtedly a treat for his most loyal devotees. That these easter eggs are meaningless and even befuddling to new readers might make sense in terms of costs and benefits. King isn’t exactly an author desperate to grow his audience; pleasing the people who keep him at the top of the bestseller lists is probably a smart strategy, and this writer achieved the kind of status that whatever he writes is going to be published. Having said all that, it’s possible that even his hardcore fans might find this story a bit slow. There are also issues in terms of style. Much of the language King uses and the cultural references he drops feel a bit creaky. The word slacks occurs with distracting frequency. King uses the phrase keeping it on the down-low in a way that suggests he probably doesn’t understand how this phrase is currently used—and has been used for quite a while. But the biggest problem is that this narrative is framed as a mystery without delivering the pleasures of a mystery. The reader knows who the bad guys are from the start. This can be an effective storytelling device, but in this case, waiting for the private investigator heroine to get to where the reader is at the beginning of the story feels interminable.
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016138
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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