Readers who relish the aftershocks of cult exploitation will turn every page with keen anticipation.
A corpse at the foot of a waterfall leads a newly isolated cop into a thicket of atrocities rooted in a 20-year-old women's cult.
At first Detective Lindsay Jackman, who must investigate the case on her own because her mentor and partner, Detective Alan Sharpe, has just killed himself, finds few clues in the death of Western Washington University student Sarah Baker, who was strangled, stripped, and dumped below Maple Falls. But her persistent questions eventually link Sarah’s murder to that of Calista Sullivan, whose body was found on the beach of Lummi Island 20 years ago. The link between the two dead women is Marnie Spellman, the self-help guru whose community on Lummi Island Calista had joined and whom Sarah was writing a story about for her student newspaper. Hard-selling a message of female empowerment through self-actualization and naturally sourced foods and cosmetics, Marnie styled herself the queen bee of a hive including Calista, actress Dina Marlow, nurses Greta Swensen and Trish Appleton, and Heather Jarred, who emerged from the hive to become a Washington congressional representative now running for the U.S. Senate. After setting up the central situation, Olsen methodically reviews each hive member’s history through extended flashbacks. The effect is both scarifying and repetitious, and Olsen has to reach deeper and deeper into his bag of tricks to keep up the momentum. Along the way, though, the characters, most of them familiar types, spring to vivid life, even the people whose only job is to find dead bodies are deftly sketched in three dimensions.
Readers who relish the aftershocks of cult exploitation will turn every page with keen anticipation.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1646-9
Page Count: 475
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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