Reeves’ uncommonly assured novel, by turns sensitive and scarifying, identifies an elusive target and hits it dead on.
Family counselor Reeves’ fourth novel is a three-act tragedy that peers beneath every parent’s worst nightmare and asks which of the statistically normal traumas underneath precipitated it.
Two days after best friends June Danforth and Natalie Carrington leave an audition at The Performing Arts High School of Boston and vanish, caretaker Charles Turner Stockbridge finds them on secluded Watties Beach, June dead of exposure, Tali still alive. Who kidnapped the 17-year-olds and left them to die? It would be nice to believe that the perp must be a drifter from outside their social circle, but Detective Fitz Jameson finds himself concentrating on several suspects unpleasantly close to the two young women: Stockbridge, who can’t explain why he found June, who died facedown, lying face up; Sam Wallace, a sophomore at Performing Arts who’s clearly its star actor; his stage mother, Ana, who’s resolved that the show must go on whatever the cost to Tali; insensitive director Greg Normand, whose reflexive response to any crisis is more bullying; and Zeke Carrington, Tali’s father, whose gambling addiction had beholden him to such seriously dangerous creditors that his wife, Nell, is considering divorce proceedings. Working with psychiatrist Dr. Cynthia Rawlins, who’s more than eager to quit her brutally taxing job of trauma counseling for a teaching job at Boston College, Fitz, who’s hiding a dark secret of his own, hunkers down to unearth the truth to the accompaniment of 27 chapter titles drawn from 27 plays.
Reeves’ uncommonly assured novel, by turns sensitive and scarifying, identifies an elusive target and hits it dead on.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64385-865-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.
The eternal jostling for power in Rome and the Vatican is juiced by a development that attracts the attention of the Magellan Billet and its foremost alumnus, Cotton Malone.
Eric Gaetano Casaburi, secretary of Italy’s National Freedom Party, anticipates a decisive victory for the party if Sergio Cardinal Ascolani, the Vatican’s secretary of state, will lend his full-throated support. Of course, the Church isn’t supposed to meddle in contemporary politics, but Eric makes an offer he doesn’t think Ascolani can refuse. Five hundred years ago, Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici loaned Pope Julius II ten million florins the Church never repaid. That debt is still legally payable to anyone who proves to be a surviving member of the Medici family, and Eric believes he can prove exactly that. Although Malone, called in to investigate the bona fides of Ascolani’s enemy Jason Cardinal Richter, has already found a fortune hidden in Richter’s apartment, Richter swears that he’s being framed, and the violent deaths of three anonymous functionaries seem to bear him out. So, Malone forges a series of alliances with Richter, with wealthy businesswoman Camilla Baines, and ultimately with an even more surprising party to prevent Ascolani and Thomas Dewberry, a hired assassin who’s both a sociopath and a devout Catholic, from swaying the upcoming election in return for Eric’s forgiving the ancient debt. An extended closing note shows how inventively Berry mingled history and fiction to weave this tangled web. Readers invested in learning more about the Medicis can be assured that the brief glimpse of them in a prologue set in 1512 is only the beginning.
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538770566
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.
Lt. Eve Dallas and her colleagues in the New York Police and Security Department step outside their comfort zone into counterterrorism.
Back in 2024, during the stressful time of the Urban Wars, a courageous band calling themselves The Twelve fought Dominion and other violent fringe groups that sought to end civilization as we know it, despite the presence of a traitor in their own midst. Now, 37 years later, someone’s killed Giovanni Rossi, a retired cybersecurity expert who was one of The Twelve, an hour or so after a summons—ostensibly from another veteran of the group—brought him from Rome to New York. On the body, officers called to the scene find a copy of Dallas’ business card that’s been embellished with a flamboyant threat to annihilate the seven surviving members of The Twelve. Obligingly inviting all seven to New York—a move you’d think would make it a lot easier for their nemesis to wipe them all out at once—Dallas soon forms a theory about the killer’s identity and sets a trap to draw him out. But her plan turns into a narrow miss, upping the stakes on both sides, for now the killer knows Dallas is on to him. It’s in the nature of the case that there’s less mystery and detection than usual in this long-running franchise—the biggest surprise turns out to be the connection between Dallas and her quarry—but the thrills keep on coming, and the final interrogation, though highly predictable in its broad outlines, is as satisfying as ever.
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370792
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
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