A satisfyingly twisty thriller from a promising new voice in crime fiction.
In this debut novel, a series of baffling murders and mysterious threats leads three men on a quest for the truth.
In April 1987, life is routine and uneventful for Ed Underwood of Providence, Rhode Island. The personnel director for Barton Jewelry, Ed enjoys spending time with his girlfriend, Liz Reynolds, and practicing karate. When Henry Cohen, president of Barton Jewelry, receives a series of cryptic notes threatening payback, he asks Ed, who was a psychology major at Wesleyan, to review them and let him know if they are a prank or something more serious. Meanwhile, Mike Langan of the Providence Police Department is perplexed by the brutal and random killings of a man leaving a bar and a clerk working at an all-night donut shop. These murders attract the attention of Stan Osiewicz, a police reporter for the Providence Journal-Bulletin. Osiewicz initially suspects that the clerk’s murder may be Mafia-related, and his stories strongly suggest an organized crime angle until he receives anonymous letters indicating the deaths are connected to Barton Jewelry. As the murder investigations intensify, the danger hits close to home for Ed. He discovers that in a case this complex, everyone is a suspect, even Ed himself. Edwards’ tale is a taut and absorbing mystery that successfully weaves together several well-developed stories that unfold with calculated precision. At the center of the action is Ed, a mild-mannered man whose life is turned upside down when his employer’s business is threatened. The author does a fine job of developing Ed’s life outside work, including his relationship with Liz and his friendship with his sensei at the karate dojo, without losing the focus on the tale’s central mysteries. Langan and Osiewicz are similarly well drawn and would make compelling protagonists in future mysteries. The narrative is fast-paced and nuanced, with the perspectives in each chapter shifting among Ed, Langan, and Osiewicz as well as Lou DiNova, the head of the New England branch of the Mafia, a man concerned that he could be implicated in the unsolved murders.
A satisfyingly twisty thriller from a promising new voice in crime fiction.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-03-912880-4
Page Count: 324
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Expert, but unsurprising.
The death of an old friend who was more than a friend sends Dr. Kay Scarpetta down her latest rabbit hole.
If every body tells a story, the corpse of 7-year-old Luna Briley sings the blues. On top of the many signs of ongoing physical abuse, there’s the fatal gunshot wound to her head. Ryder and Piper Briley, the wealthy and powerful parents who didn’t call the police until after their daughter died, insist that Luna’s death was an accident, or maybe a suicide. Scarpetta doesn’t think so, and her refusal to release the body to the Brileys’ hand-picked mortician moves them to legal action against her as Virginia’s chief medical examiner. You’d think it would be a relief to put this case aside for another when Scarpetta’s niece, Secret Service agent Lucy Farinelli, calls her and ferries her by helicopter to an abandoned Oz theme park owned by Ryder Briley, but this one’s even more heartbreaking. Scarpetta is there to examine the body of astrophysicist Sal Giordano, her close friend and former lover, who was evidently kidnapped, held in captivity for several hours, and tossed out of an unidentified aircraft. The leading suspects are the Brileys; Carrie Grethen, Lucy’s sociopathic ex-lover, with whom Scarpetta has repeatedly tangled in the past; and the UFO that dumped Giordano’s body without leaving the usual traces for air-traffic technologies to pick up. The multiple rounds of physical examinations Scarpetta conducts on both victims are every bit as meticulous and gripping as fans would expect; the killer’s identity is neither surprising nor interesting, but Cornwell juggles her trademark forensics, and the paranormal hints she’s become increasingly invested in, more dexterously than usual.
Expert, but unsurprising.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781538770382
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
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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