A well-plotted mystery to curl up with.
Traymore’s suspenseful mystery novel, the second in a series, pits one stalker against another.
Victoria Mancusio’s life is at a precarious pass. After her husband, Nick, had an affair and faced a murder trial (he was acquitted), the marriage bond is very tenuous. The national publicity of the trial drew the attention of former art professor Timothy Sutton, a sexual predator who attacked Victoria when she was an undergraduate. She fought him off, and he was even forced out of his university position. So now, 10 years later, this narcissist may be out for revenge (he’s sending Victoria threatening texts), and he knows where she lives. She flies from her art gallery in New York to Arizona, deducing that he might be there. Indeed, she spots him and also finds and enlists Jenna Williams, another woman who survived his attacks, as a reluctant ally in trying to get this menace off the streets. Victoria is also attracted to hunky Scottsdale Police Department detective Randy Ramirez. Sutton winds up in “ankle monitor” custody but cuts it off and slips away, whereabouts unknown; likewise, Jenna, whom Victoria had bankrolled to move east, takes off. Now it’s cat and mouse, with Sutton and Victoria each both the cat and the mouse, leading to a surprising and violent conclusion. Traymore is a very competent writer (“There was enough guilt in this family to fill purgatory”) and very good with plotting and suspense. Another strong element is that everyone—even the good guys—harbors secrets. It began with Nick’s infidelity and is echoed in the flirtation between Victoria and Randy. And those are just a few examples. For the very best reasons (she tells herself), Victoria is playing it close to the vest, while Nick finally admits that he was not totally truthful about certain details, even after he confessed to the infidelity. There is even a grace note of deception, as it were: Victoria may have been the result of her mother’s early-on extramarital dalliance. The novel reads like a primer on tangled webs, and Traymore is clearly having fun with it.
A well-plotted mystery to curl up with.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2022
ISBN: 9781956806779
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Indie Pub Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 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
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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