An engaging series entry with sensational characters and a focused mystery.
In this fourth installment of a thriller series, Los Angeles police detective Gabriel McRay reluctantly works with a psychic to close a missing person cold case.
Gabriel has a troubled history, and most recently, he suffered through torture by a serial killer. In an effort to give him a bit of a break, his superiors hand him a 30-year-old case involving the disappearance of teenager Nancy Lynn Lewicki in 1988. He’s just diving in and reexamining the evidence when he gets an offer of help that he doesn’t want after celebrity TV psychic Carmen Jenette convinces Nancy’s parents to hire her. Although Carmen believes in her own abilities, she feels that her fame has made people think she’s a charlatan, and she hopes that solving Nancy’s case will remedy that. Gabriel, however, remains skeptical even after Carmen insists that he’s a “conduit”—that Nancy is somehow reaching out to the detective from beyond the grave. After Carmen mentions the investigation on her show, someone attacks her, although she’s able to fend them off. Gabriel soon has a break in the case, which leads him to a person of interest, but he eventually realizes that Carmen could prove to be an invaluable asset. Stevens’ character development is exceptional in this installment. Although Carmen initially comes off as pretentious and Gabriel acts churlishly toward her, they’re both shown to be devoted to resolving the mystery. Gabriel’s scene-stealing medical examiner fiancee, Ming Li, and Nancy’s mother, Pauline, whose unwavering optimism counters the protagonist’s somber past, add to the enjoyment. Best of all, the author usefully limits Carmen’s gift—it’s helpful, but it doesn’t simply reveal the culprit. As in preceding installments, Stevens’ concise prose keeps the investigation in the foreground, and plot turns will keep readers’ interest until the final page.
An engaging series entry with sensational characters and a focused mystery.Pub Date: April 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9970068-2-7
Page Count: 394
Publisher: FYD Media, LLC
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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
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