A well-executed classic mystery to curl up with, featuring an admirably complex hero.
A blizzard and a dead body turn a peaceful retreat into a suspenseful whodunnit in Regan’s mystery novel.
Detective Josie Quinn has been struggling since the death of her beloved colleague Mett. Watching him die was just the latest in a series of traumatic events both on and off the job, and the effects of PTSD are keeping her from focusing or sleeping. To work on her insomnia, Josie signs up for the Sacred New Beginnings Retreat at a remote mountain lodge north of her home in Denton, Pennsylvania. There, the warm and inviting doctor Sandrine Morrow has assembled a small group of six people, each reeling from some traumatic event—harrowing incidents of rape, stalking, murder, and freak accidents have brought them all together. Josie begins to worry that an impending snowstorm will trap them without enough supplies. (“There are worse places to be stuck although the company could be better. Buch of sad sacks, we are,” quips Alice, the wise-cracking New York City nurse with whom Josie quickly bonds.) The lodge’s capable caretaker sets off with the only satellite phone, and the trap for a classic closed-circle mystery is set when one of the retreat participants is soon found dead in the rising snow. Josie does her best to gather what few clues she can, but with wild bears on the prowl, no cell service, and dwindling supplies, the remaining guests have to all work together just to survive, even though they know that one of them is likely a murderer. As therapeutic talk breaks down into tense, violent exchanges, Josie’s husband, Noah, sets out from Denton determined to bring his wife home (and make up for a fight that they had before her departure). While struggling to get through the storm, Noah also stumbles into a dangerous situation stemming from New Beginnings. Both husband and wife will have to face the elements and their inner demons to make it out of this storm alive.
Regan’s setup for this country murder mystery is as classic as it gets, but her clever twist—making each of the possible suspects a victim recovering from trauma—adds a unique layer of emotion to the proceedings. Readers unfamiliar with detective Josie from the other books in Regan’s series will find themselves immediately drawn to her vulnerability—having the book’s earliest scenes depict her sessions with Dr. Morrow is a smart way to dig into the complex protagonist’s psychology before getting into the sleuthing. The lodge storyline becomes a slowly simmering pot of deception and intrigue, while Noah’s parallel adventure punctuates the book with more action-packed thrills—Regan smartly alternates between the two to keep readers turning the pages. The final revelations and motivations feel like they come together a bit too quickly and neatly; the complex psychology driving the first half is eschewed to reveal a much more traditionally evil villain, but Regan still delivers a worthy entry in her series. Readers will be easily drawn in by her smart characters and her snowy mountain setting, both perfectly cozy and creepy.
A well-executed classic mystery to curl up with, featuring an admirably complex hero.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781837909483
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Bookouture
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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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