Skillfully built tension will keep the pages turning.
When a man disappears under suspicious circumstances, a young couple tries to cover their involvement while his wife begins to wonder what they know.
When Christian Scott returns home to find his wife, Lily, upset and scared, he assumes at first that she's had another miscarriage. Instead, Lily shares with him a horrific story: While she was taking a walk at a nearby nature preserve, she'd run into Jake Hayes, the husband of her friend and fellow teacher Nina, and he dragged her into the forest and tried to rape her. She'd only escaped by hitting him on the head with a rock. This sets up the major conflict of the novel: Christian and Lily must try to cover Lily’s tracks in case the head wound turned out to be fatal. Nina and Jake had had a fight the night before, so Nina isn't surprised that she doesn't hear from him at first, but as she begins to realize Jake is missing and then goes to the police, she has no idea that Christian and Lily are working behind the scenes to protect Lily. Eventually she notices that something is wrong with their behavior, though, and she vacillates between investigating them and retreating to her mother's comforting arms. The chapters are divided between Christian's and Nina’s first-person perspectives, and the entire action unfurls after the crime has presumably been committed, which adds an intriguing layer to the suspense. There isn't much of a focus on the victim, as we never get to know Jake except through other people’s reminiscences. Instead, the possible suspects take center stage. The only weakness here is a common one in Kubica’s thrillers: The solution, when it comes, seems a somewhat unearned misdirection, but in this case, it also serves as a reminder that some characters are, as some people are, more invisible than others.
Skillfully built tension will keep the pages turning.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9780778333111
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
Expert, but unsurprising.
The death of an old friend who was more than a friend sends Dr. Kay Scarpetta down her latest rabbit hole.
If every body tells a story, the corpse of 7-year-old Luna Briley sings the blues. On top of the many signs of ongoing physical abuse, there’s the fatal gunshot wound to her head. Ryder and Piper Briley, the wealthy and powerful parents who didn’t call the police until after their daughter died, insist that Luna’s death was an accident, or maybe a suicide. Scarpetta doesn’t think so, and her refusal to release the body to the Brileys’ hand-picked mortician moves them to legal action against her as Virginia’s chief medical examiner. You’d think it would be a relief to put this case aside for another when Scarpetta’s niece, Secret Service agent Lucy Farinelli, calls her and ferries her by helicopter to an abandoned Oz theme park owned by Ryder Briley, but this one’s even more heartbreaking. Scarpetta is there to examine the body of astrophysicist Sal Giordano, her close friend and former lover, who was evidently kidnapped, held in captivity for several hours, and tossed out of an unidentified aircraft. The leading suspects are the Brileys; Carrie Grethen, Lucy’s sociopathic ex-lover, with whom Scarpetta has repeatedly tangled in the past; and the UFO that dumped Giordano’s body without leaving the usual traces for air-traffic technologies to pick up. The multiple rounds of physical examinations Scarpetta conducts on both victims are every bit as meticulous and gripping as fans would expect; the killer’s identity is neither surprising nor interesting, but Cornwell juggles her trademark forensics, and the paranormal hints she’s become increasingly invested in, more dexterously than usual.
Expert, but unsurprising.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781538770382
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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