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LITTLE THREATS

Read this not for the whodunit but for a gripping character study of an accused girl making sense of her reality.

A 15-year-old murder case gets new life after the convicted killer, Kennedy Wynn, is released from prison.

Just a teenager when convicted, the now 30-something Kennedy is learning how to be a free woman. While she was in jail, her mother died of cancer, her twin sister, Carter, battled addiction and got sober, and her father—who, as a lawyer, was convinced the charges against Kennedy would be dropped—lived alone with his guilt. And though Kennedy is free to start over, she quickly realizes that the baggage she carries from Haley Kimberson’s death is not easily discarded. Even Carter, the person Kennedy needs most, isn’t convinced her twin is innocent. But Kennedy can’t defend herself because she has no memory of the murder night, only of finding Haley’s body: “Haley was my friend and now she was falling apart.” Kennedy’s release garners the attention of Dee Nash, a former detective–turned-host of the TV show Crime After Crime, who's interested in poking holes in this long-standing narrative to potentially prove Kennedy’s innocence. For one, could a young girl have the strength to inflict those wounds? Kennedy, who tells much of her story via creative writing exercises done in prison, says it best: “There is always a living boy to go with a dead girl.” But which boy? Berk Butler, who was with Kennedy and Haley that fateful night, but who had “more money, more lawyers” than the Wynns during the trial? Or someone else? As multiple characters search for the truth, the most compelling point of view is Kennedy’s retrospective account from prison. Kennedy’s voice comes across as detached, the omniscient perspective of someone who’s had a lot of time to think over the details. In order to understand what led to Haley’s death, Kennedy considers all the little threats that lived under the surface of her family's and friends’ daily lives that could have grown into something more sinister. This detached voice bleeds into the rest of the narrative, making the slow build toward truth feel impersonal. Haley’s memory haunts those who miss her most, but this metaphor takes on a more literal, paranormal form toward the end. The most effective revelation is more subtle—that everyone is more than who they are on the surface, and nothing is ever exactly as it seems.

Read this not for the whodunit but for a gripping character study of an accused girl making sense of her reality.

Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-08699-5

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020

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TELL ME WHAT YOU DID

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

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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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