An involving mystery elevated by vivid characterizations.
A black police detective investigating a murder finds himself drawn to a white woman who claims to have psychic visions of the killer.
In time-honored, crime novel tradition, Detective Jesse Aaron gets his world rocked when a beautiful woman enters his office with information about a “nasty case with no easy answers.” The murder victim is Rosa Logan. Sariah Brennan states she knows who the killer is. “I don’t know his full name, but he’s called Casey,” she informs Aaron. “A big dark man with a scar on his neck.” When Aaron asks her whether she was an eyewitness to the crime, she responds: “I saw him…in my head, like in a vision.” The incredulous Aaron is surprised when parts of Brennan’s story check out, including key information that had been withheld from the media. Complicating matters is that the suspect, Kazimir Capek, or K.C., has reportedly been dead for three years. Brennan not only sticks to her story, she also insists to Aaron and his black female partner, Camille Farris, that the killer is still alive and another woman, named Elisabeth, is in danger. Aaron doesn’t know what to make of Brennan. Farris is openly hostile, bad cop to his good cop (“If you’re through wasting our time, we have work to do”). But Aaron cannot convince himself he is just intrigued by the mystery. He wonders whether something is happening between him and Brennan: “When she asked him to call her Sariah, did she guess how easily he already thought of her that way?” Griffin has a gift for romantic suspense. Aaron and Brennan’s budding relationship, which is complicated by her secrets, builds deliberately and credibly and elicits as much interest as the resolution of the murder case. The issue of race adds an intriguing wrinkle to old school murder mystery tropes, although this could have been developed further. When Brennan remarks that she isn’t used to being alone with someone she doesn’t know, Aaron wonders if “someone” maybe means a black man. And Farris’ tirades include her objection to “brothers who try to score points by getting a white chick.” She tells Aaron: “It shouldn’t be so hard to stick to your own kind.”
An involving mystery elevated by vivid characterizations.Pub Date: March 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5092-3045-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2020
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
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.
Having been falsely convicted of murder himself years ago, prosecutor Rusty Sabich defies common wisdom in defending his romantic partner’s adopted son against the same accusation.
Now 76, Rusty has retired to the (fictitious) Skageon Region in the upper Midwest, far removed from Kindle County, Turow’s Chicago stand-in, where he was a star attorney and judge. Aaron Housley, a Black man raised in a bleached rural environment, has had his troubles, including serving four months for holding drugs purchased by Mae Potter, his erratic, on-and-off girlfriend. Now, after suddenly disappearing to parts unknown with her, he returns alone. When days go by without Mae’s reappearance, it is widely assumed that Aaron harmed her. Why else would he be in possession of her phone? Following the discovery of Mae’s strangled body and incriminating evidence that points to Aaron, Rusty steps in. Opposed in court by the uncontrollable, gloriously named prosecutor Hiram Jackdorp, he fears he’s in a lose-lose situation. If he fails to get Aaron off, which is highly possible, the boy’s mother, Bea, will never forgive him. If Rusty wins the case, the quietly detached Bea—who, like half the town, has secrets—will have trouble living with the unsparing methods Rusty uses to free Aaron. In attempting to match, or at least approach, the brilliance of his groundbreaking masterpiece Presumed Innocent (1987), Turow has his own odds to overcome. No minor achievement like a previous follow-up, Innocent (2010), the new novel is a powerful display of straightforward narrative, stuffed with compelling descriptions of people, places, and the legal process. No one stages courtroom scenes better than this celebrated Chicago attorney. But the book, whose overly long scenes add up to more than 500 pages, mostly lacks the gripping intensity and high moral drama to keep those pages turning. It’s an absorbing and entertaining read, but Turow’s fans have come to expect more than that.
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538706367
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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