A sprawling, ambitious thriller for readers with a taste for florid invention and broad strokes of the supernatural.
The creepiest painting ever encountered in fiction or real life sends a beleaguered Italian police officer searching for the killer in a 70-year-old case.
Before he gave up painting at the age of 23, Alessio Andrian completed fewer than a dozen pictures. Raffaello Andrian, the artist’s great-nephew, has offered the last of them, The Sleeping Nymph, to gallery owner Gianmaria Gortan, whose routine tests of the painting have disclosed something deeply disturbing: the presence of blood. The Sleeping Nymph isn’t marred by traces of blood; the whole painting has been executed in blood—and not the artist’s own—mixed with the odd bit of cardiac tissue, as if to establish its authenticity. Charged with investigating the presumed murder of the sleeping nymph, Superintendent Teresa Battaglia finds that Alessio Andrian, though he’s still alive, hasn’t spoken since he completed the picture in 1945. So she follows the nymph’s trail to the Slovenian region of Resia, where she’s swiftly caught up in tales of the artist’s resistance to the occupying Germans as the war wound down. As a present-day murder forces her to ask whether she’s really looking for a single killer pushing 90, she has to contend with two other adversaries: Albert Lona, an old enemy who’s stepped in to replace her suddenly stricken boss, and her own creeping dementia, which she’s struggling to keep secret. It’s lucky that she can obtain the services of Smoky, an amazingly talented Human Remains Detection dog, and Blanca Zago, his blind trainer, because she’ll need all the help she can get.
A sprawling, ambitious thriller for readers with a taste for florid invention and broad strokes of the supernatural.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-641-29121-7
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
No, it’s not for everyone—but if you want to read a supercharged meta-pastiche like this, this is exactly the one to read.
The 50th annual Australian Mystery Writers’ Festival, taking place aboard a long-distance train bound from Darwin to Adelaide, is punctuated by snarky dialogue, murder, and a zillion inventive misdirections.
“Why [am] I here?” wonders Ernest Cunningham, whose struggles to write his second book are interrupted by his invitation as a headliner at the festival-on-wheels, which will turn into the setting of his new book. Thriller writer S.F. Majors, former forensic pathologist Alan Royce, and artsy one-named Wolfgang are all much better known than he is. So is Lisa Fulton, even though she hasn’t published a novel in 20 years. And of course Henry McTavish, the bestselling creator of Detective Morbund, is in a different league altogether. After making a series of disingenuous promises about future developments—since he’s narrating the tale in the first person, for instance, he will definitely survive, and the killer’s name will be mentioned exactly 106 more times going forward—Ernest gets down to business with a combination of zeal and obliviousness. True to his word, he chronicles more than one murder, reveals a multitude of other felonies from burglary to rape, links the current mystery to a much older case, and sets the stage for a series of escalating reveals, one of them interrupted so many times that the self-anointed detective complains, “There’s not normally this much heckling in a denouement.” Stevenson rivals his golden age models in his willingness to sprinkle every scene with clever clues, outdoes them in setting up a dazzling series of false conclusions, and leaves them in the dust for modern-day fans with an appetite for self-reflexiveness.
No, it’s not for everyone—but if you want to read a supercharged meta-pastiche like this, this is exactly the one to read.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780063279070
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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