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
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
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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