A fine introduction to Elmwood, which horror fans will find a nice place to visit.
In Karraker’s horror novel, an asylum inmate may hold the key to unsolved murders committed 20 years ago.
In 1999, FBI Special Agent David Nolan visits Green Elm Home to interview Tommy Wilford about a series of unsolved murders in Elmwood, Vermont, which Wilford may have witnessed in 1978, when he was 8 years old. It’s just a formality, Nolan reassures Wilford’s attending physician: “It’s the kind of nothing job that comes up when someone wants a promotion.” Wilford’s story, which involves tentacled monsters, is the same testimony that got him committed long ago, but he’s sticking with it: “I’d say I know a lot of things,” he eerily says. The narrative extends all the way back to 1968 in Vietnam (“A lot of messed up stuff happened there,” Wilford notes. “It’s no wonder some of it followed people home”) and is told from a variety of perspectives, including Wilford’s childhood classmates Elise Smithfield and Will Ross,who survived an initial attack that took the lives of two of Tommy’s childhood tormentors. Are these the “fantastic ravings of a certified lunatic,” as Nolan initially characterizes them, or, in classic horror tradition, is something still out there? It’s too soon to determine if Elmwood will become a destination for horror fans on a par with horror master Stephen King’s Castle Rock, Maine, but in his debut novel, Karraker does an effective job of scene-setting and worldbuilding. Several elements will be familiar to King fans, including childhood horrors, social outcasts and bullies, a fearsome supernatural entity, and gruesome deaths. The various pieces of the puzzle don’t fit together perfectly; how Wilford knows what went on in other people’s homes, for example, is a mystery. However, the book evokes palpable dread and terror, as when one character is described as “frozen in fear, the sanity vanishing from her eyes.”
A fine introduction to Elmwood, which horror fans will find a nice place to visit.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798987847909
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Gray River Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
