A grim but exciting and compelling mystery even in its most disconcerting moments.
A young woman unearths troublesome secrets in her late grandfather’s past in Vancise’s dark thriller.
After a family tragedy five years ago, Evie Day left her small town behind for another Arkansas city. Now, in 1991, her beloved grandfather Ollie’s death has brought the 23-year-old back home. While perusing family photos, she finds a mysterious image of an unknown woman standing near a tiny wooden box. It’s connected to Ollie’s first case as a uniform cop—and it’s only one of a series of cryptic items that Evie stumbles upon, including an old vial of blood and a knitting needle with dried gore on its tip. She’s determined to make sense of it all, but her investigation leads to more questions. Who, for example, is the “street lady” she keeps seeing in her immediate vicinity? Evie’s amateur sleuthing later results in someone’s breaking into her apartment to leave her a threatening note. Elsewhere, a man named Charlie Baker, with a therapist’s help, is attempting to unlock repressed memories of unspeakable trauma, which ultimately links to Evie’s investigation. Vancise’s young hero is intriguingly complicated. For example, she gives her mom the cold shoulder for initially mysterious reasons, pines for a boyfriend she broke up with, and digs into the opaque mystery of her grandfather out of sheer curiosity. It’s a treat to follow Evie as she gradually works out the puzzle, although when the story introduces her friend’s psychic ability and FBI ties, it feels a bit too convenient. The unrelentingly bleak scenes involving Charlie teem with violent images, some of which involve children. However, it’s a testament to Vancise’s writing that the most graphic sequences are implied rather than excessively detailed. The author also excels at offering subtle updates, with Evie doing quick, helpful run-throughs of what she’s learned so far and what she’s still looking for. Numerous surprises pop up, and not all in the final act; however, one of the later ones packs the meanest punch.
A grim but exciting and compelling mystery even in its most disconcerting moments.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2022
ISBN: 9781639886913
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.
Having been falsely convicted of murder himself years ago, prosecutor Rusty Sabich defies common wisdom in defending his romantic partner’s adopted son against the same accusation.
Now 76, Rusty has retired to the (fictitious) Skageon Region in the upper Midwest, far removed from Kindle County, Turow’s Chicago stand-in, where he was a star attorney and judge. Aaron Housley, a Black man raised in a bleached rural environment, has had his troubles, including serving four months for holding drugs purchased by Mae Potter, his erratic, on-and-off girlfriend. Now, after suddenly disappearing to parts unknown with her, he returns alone. When days go by without Mae’s reappearance, it is widely assumed that Aaron harmed her. Why else would he be in possession of her phone? Following the discovery of Mae’s strangled body and incriminating evidence that points to Aaron, Rusty steps in. Opposed in court by the uncontrollable, gloriously named prosecutor Hiram Jackdorp, he fears he’s in a lose-lose situation. If he fails to get Aaron off, which is highly possible, the boy’s mother, Bea, will never forgive him. If Rusty wins the case, the quietly detached Bea—who, like half the town, has secrets—will have trouble living with the unsparing methods Rusty uses to free Aaron. In attempting to match, or at least approach, the brilliance of his groundbreaking masterpiece Presumed Innocent (1987), Turow has his own odds to overcome. No minor achievement like a previous follow-up, Innocent (2010), the new novel is a powerful display of straightforward narrative, stuffed with compelling descriptions of people, places, and the legal process. No one stages courtroom scenes better than this celebrated Chicago attorney. But the book, whose overly long scenes add up to more than 500 pages, mostly lacks the gripping intensity and high moral drama to keep those pages turning. It’s an absorbing and entertaining read, but Turow’s fans have come to expect more than that.
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538706367
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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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