A timely reminder of a shameful period in American history and an addictive read with some final surprises.
Park’s gripping debut novel, an unconventional love story, unfolds in KKK–controlled Cattahatchie County, Mississippi, during a violent 1969 civil rights struggle.
Holly Lee Carter returns to her hometown to take over the family’s newspaper, which covers only white news, and finds herself in the center of family turmoil and a Klan uprising over school integration. Twenty-eight-year-old Holly had left Cattahatchie County and her family 10 years ago, studied photography, and gone to Vietnam. She returned to California paralyzed from the waist down. Now, her father has died in a mysterious automobile accident and unexpectedly left her the controlling interest in the Current-Leader as well as title to the family’s country home, Wolf’s Run. It’s a major blow to her older brother, Tom Carter, who expected to be their father’s heir and had hoped to sell the 7-decades-old paper. As Holly arrives in Cattahatchie County, accompanied by good friend and personal assistant, Eve Howard, her car is run off the road into a muddy ditch by members of the Klan. High school upperclassmen Nate Wallace and Cutter Carlucci come to the rescue. Nate and popular football star Cutter have been friends since childhood. Now each is enduring a family crisis. Their friendship will be severely tested when Holly and Cutter develop an unexpected bond. Nate is more of a secondary character—a representation of a generation angry at change but gradually wrestling with the horror of the present. Park takes a risk, assigning to Nate the task of being both first-person and omniscient third-person narrator in this complex story. It is, at times, confusing. But the author’s ability to turn a phrase, capturing, in a few words time, place and atmosphere, is a joy. Here is Nate describing the year after his brother was killed in Vietnam: “Mamma had grieved herself into the ground.” Solid character portrayals, personal melodrama, a murder mystery, and unrestrained violence propel this page-turner to its explosive conclusion.
A timely reminder of a shameful period in American history and an addictive read with some final surprises.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72833-140-9
Page Count: 482
Publisher: Desire Street Books & Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2019
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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