Suspenseful fare that will resonate in the #MeToo era.
A woman attempts to retrace the steps leading up to her best friend’s sudden disappearance, and all paths lead to a rape that occurred more than a decade ago.
In 2005, 17-year-old Ellen was fascinated with her new neighbors, the bohemian Monktons. Olivia was a celebrated opera singer, her husband, Tony, a talented bassoonist, and their two teenage boys, Nicholas and Daniel, were both musically gifted. But the most fascinating one of all was the ethereally beautiful Sasha, Olivia’s goddaughter, who lived with them. Olivia and Tony regularly threw lavish parties where alcohol flowed freely among the adults and the teenagers, and Ellen eventually became close with Sasha, much to the chagrin of her best friend, Karina, who was pushed to the side. When Daniel was accused of raping Karina, all hell broke loose, and Sasha, Karina, and Ellen all had to testify at his trial. Now he’s out of prison and Sasha has gone missing from the apartment she shares with Ellen. Ellen is terrified that Daniel has carried out the threats he’s made against them in the past, but as she questions their friends and families and revisits the night of the rape, the line between truth and lies begins to blur. The narration moves between past and present and the viewpoints of Ellen, Olivia, and Karina. Olivia’s observations during Daniel’s trial are poignant, as she struggles with the urge to protect her beloved son and the horror that he just might have done what he’s been accused of. Marshall (Friend Request, 2017) knows her way around the complicated, sometimes-fraught nature of female friendship, and she doles out plenty of expertly placed red herrings. The Monktons are like something out of a V.C. Andrews drama: Their foibles affect nearly everyone in their orbit, with disastrous consequences. Ultimately, this road is well-traveled, but Marshall is a competent storyteller, and readers will be mostly content to ride along to the slightly contrived, but satisfying, finale.
Suspenseful fare that will resonate in the #MeToo era.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4789-4856-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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