A somber and disquieting portrayal of human frailties and familial disconnection.
In Dwyer’s debut novel, a series of teenagers’ deaths brings about crises in the lives of a high school senior gridiron star and his deeply religious mother.
Forty-six-year-old Anne Norrisis a devoutly Catholic homemaker. Her husband, Dane, is a retired NFL star, and their sons, Dylan and Janus, are entering their senior and freshman years (respectively) at St. Ambrose High School in Asheville, North Carolina. Dylan, in particular, is highly sought by Division I college football recruiters. The boys’ rebellious, partying older sister, Maryanne, is estranged from their parents, so Anne has become overprotective of her sons to the point of driving Dylan away. After several St. Ambrose students are killed over the summer—four by accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, two due to reckless driving, one by suicide, and one from fentanyl-laced cocaine—a sense of dread descends on the community. Anne feels increasingly helpless, especially because Dane has embraced a hands-off parenting style. Dylan, with a sunny future laid out for him, experiments with drugs and meaningless sexual liaisons, which eventually draws unwelcome attention. Anne, meanwhile, commits a desperate act that cuts to the heart of her faith and marriage. Dwyer writes in the omniscient past tense, employing a flowing prose style that ably establishes people and places. The characters are distinct and memorable, and their personalities emerge organically from the story. The point of the novel is difficult to pin down: Is it about college football recruiting? Parent/teen relationships? Religion? Identity? Is there a supernatural element to the deaths? The result is an intricately themed, rather grim depiction of how human flaws can bring about tragedy. The work has an elegiacal sense of happier times fading, and the intrusion of a changing world upon Asheville is cleverly personified through Dane and Dylan, who represent similar figures in different generations. Although the narrative develops slowly, with lengthy backstories and too-long discourses on football and religion, readers willing to immerse themselves will be rewarded.
A somber and disquieting portrayal of human frailties and familial disconnection.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2022
ISBN: 979-8986400709
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Expert, but unsurprising.
The death of an old friend who was more than a friend sends Dr. Kay Scarpetta down her latest rabbit hole.
If every body tells a story, the corpse of 7-year-old Luna Briley sings the blues. On top of the many signs of ongoing physical abuse, there’s the fatal gunshot wound to her head. Ryder and Piper Briley, the wealthy and powerful parents who didn’t call the police until after their daughter died, insist that Luna’s death was an accident, or maybe a suicide. Scarpetta doesn’t think so, and her refusal to release the body to the Brileys’ hand-picked mortician moves them to legal action against her as Virginia’s chief medical examiner. You’d think it would be a relief to put this case aside for another when Scarpetta’s niece, Secret Service agent Lucy Farinelli, calls her and ferries her by helicopter to an abandoned Oz theme park owned by Ryder Briley, but this one’s even more heartbreaking. Scarpetta is there to examine the body of astrophysicist Sal Giordano, her close friend and former lover, who was evidently kidnapped, held in captivity for several hours, and tossed out of an unidentified aircraft. The leading suspects are the Brileys; Carrie Grethen, Lucy’s sociopathic ex-lover, with whom Scarpetta has repeatedly tangled in the past; and the UFO that dumped Giordano’s body without leaving the usual traces for air-traffic technologies to pick up. The multiple rounds of physical examinations Scarpetta conducts on both victims are every bit as meticulous and gripping as fans would expect; the killer’s identity is neither surprising nor interesting, but Cornwell juggles her trademark forensics, and the paranormal hints she’s become increasingly invested in, more dexterously than usual.
Expert, but unsurprising.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781538770382
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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