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
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.
The eternal jostling for power in Rome and the Vatican is juiced by a development that attracts the attention of the Magellan Billet and its foremost alumnus, Cotton Malone.
Eric Gaetano Casaburi, secretary of Italy’s National Freedom Party, anticipates a decisive victory for the party if Sergio Cardinal Ascolani, the Vatican’s secretary of state, will lend his full-throated support. Of course, the Church isn’t supposed to meddle in contemporary politics, but Eric makes an offer he doesn’t think Ascolani can refuse. Five hundred years ago, Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici loaned Pope Julius II ten million florins the Church never repaid. That debt is still legally payable to anyone who proves to be a surviving member of the Medici family, and Eric believes he can prove exactly that. Although Malone, called in to investigate the bona fides of Ascolani’s enemy Jason Cardinal Richter, has already found a fortune hidden in Richter’s apartment, Richter swears that he’s being framed, and the violent deaths of three anonymous functionaries seem to bear him out. So, Malone forges a series of alliances with Richter, with wealthy businesswoman Camilla Baines, and ultimately with an even more surprising party to prevent Ascolani and Thomas Dewberry, a hired assassin who’s both a sociopath and a devout Catholic, from swaying the upcoming election in return for Eric’s forgiving the ancient debt. An extended closing note shows how inventively Berry mingled history and fiction to weave this tangled web. Readers invested in learning more about the Medicis can be assured that the brief glimpse of them in a prologue set in 1512 is only the beginning.
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538770566
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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