A wry, sad coming-of-age story and a well-crafted first novel.
A journalist makes her fiction debut with a tale of missing girls as told by one girl who never stopped missing them.
So many girls disappear. This is true in life. It’s maybe even truer in fiction. Girls who go missing are an endless source of fascination. Or maybe this is just when the girls are white and, at the very least, middle-class. These girls are especially compelling when they’re beautiful. Cordelia Van Apfel was white, middle-class, and beautiful before she and her sisters vanished from an Australian suburb in 1992, and she is the absence at the heart of McLean’s debut novel. Tikka Malloy is heading home from America because her sister, Laura, is battling cancer. Tikka’s return doesn’t revive her search for the beguiling Cordie—she has never stopped searching for Cordie; she sees Cordie everywhere—but Tikka’s presence brings long-buried secrets back to the surface of the insular community in which she and her sister became friends with the Van Apfel girls before they disappeared. Tikka has a sharp sense of self-awareness. She recognizes that her place in the hierarchy of neighborhood girls—not quite included by the older girls, eager to separate herself from the younger—and the trauma of losing her friends have left her stunted as an adult. But all of this makes Tikka a terrific narrator. She examines her memories with the perspective of a grown-up, and she finds that people who were reticent to tell her everything when the Van Apfel girls went missing are eager to unburden themselves now. Tikka’s conversations with her father are especially affecting, and of course the local busybody and Tupperware saleswoman has a great deal of information and insight to share. There are, ultimately, no real surprises. What happened to Cordie is something that happens to any number of girls. It’s the disappearance of her sisters with her that made her story sensational. But Cordie isn’t like other girls for Tikka, which makes her special for the reader, too.
A wry, sad coming-of-age story and a well-crafted first novel.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-964-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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