Sufficiently gripping and intricate to excuse the slow reveal.
Corruption and the disappearance of a former student bring a growing sense of unease to a college town in Brookhouse’s novel.
Lenny Grey is a student, “when he can afford it.” He attends Prester, located in Prester, North Carolina, and considered one of the most prestigious private colleges in the South. He has only a few courses to complete before being handed an English degree, but he’s struggling to find the funds to graduate despite working side jobs as a waiter and handyman. As a prizewinning essayist, he is asked by the college to tutor student athletes. The school has a history of not admitting “more than the token Black,” but an exception is made for Wallace Wallace, a basketball star who struggles academically. Lenny is unofficially tasked with writing Wallace’s papers—in other words, cheating. In addition to racism and corruption, Prester is also dogged by the disappearance of Haley Flagg, a college dropout. After a private detective is hired and the town is found to be a font of unsavory activity, none of its citizens is beyond suspicion. The prose is an urgent machine-gun rattle of short, precise, descriptive sentences: “Home again. Maisie’s Bug was behind the trailer. Lenny lifted the tarp.” This sense of immediacy is tempered by occasional passages of ponderous, atmospheric prose: “Once upon a time seasonal darkness relieved only by the thin flame of a candle provided opportunity for contemplation and ruminating on the baffling questions of mortality.” The plot unfolds at a leisurely pace—perhaps too leisurely for some readers. The unrushed narrative provides opportunities to get to know some of the oddball townsfolk the author has created, such as the controversial artist Zephyr Harrison, who is paid to paint some young girls: “If Daddy wanted prim purity and the sloe-eyed family spaniel, he should have commissioned someone else.” Drawing upon this cast of strange, psychologically convincing characters, Brookhouse cleverly pulls back the skin of small-town America to reveal deeply rooted racism and multiple layers of sleaze. The story is unpredictable, throwing in a delicious plot twist that will keep readers guessing until the end.
Sufficiently gripping and intricate to excuse the slow reveal.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781734499520
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Safe Harbor Books
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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