A fascinating debut crime novel that is more despairing than satisfying.
A subversive serial-killer tale that dives headfirst into a furious mind.
Sophie Braam bartends in small-town Virginia, bearing witness to awful behavior from her male patrons and co-workers, whom she likens to insects: “A thousand licking tongues laid their voices like eggs in the soft places of me, hatching with every slippery compliment drifting down my thigh…an entire universe of mites writhing, making a home, under my skin.” One night, Mark Dixon—a wealthy friend of the restaurant owner—arrives while Sophie is closing, needles her with his drunken entitlement, and sexually assaults her. Sophie snaps and strangles Mark in self-defense. These opening chapters build tension masterfully. Jennett plays with our sympathies by rooting us in Sophie’s point of view, demonstrating how her murderous impulses are rooted in relatable and well-articulated rage against misogynistic violence. Sophie explains: “A witch in the woods is not born overnight; we are grown.” Meanwhile, Nora Martin, a biracial police officer investigating Mark’s murder, is haunted by the “haints” of female murder victims. This teases an intriguing premise that never fully actualizes, wherein the detective on the killer’s trail understands and even sympathizes with the killer, à la Will Graham from Thomas Harris’ Hannibal series. (Sophie possesses shades of Hannibal Lecter’s artful hubris and anatomical knowledge, combined with the sociopathy of Lou Ford from Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me.) Sophie’s lacerating insights about patriarchy are woven into tangled screeds whose ultimate point is that “all men are the same,” a position that goes relatively unchallenged. The deliriously vengeful narration compels the reader to continue but is bloated with so much grotesquely beautiful imagery and metaphor that the language often impedes narrative momentum.
A fascinating debut crime novel that is more despairing than satisfying.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-374-60709-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
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
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.
Following the mysterious disappearance of his wife, a struggling London novelist journeys to a remote Scottish island to try to get his mojo back—but all, of course, is not what it seems.
Grady Green hits the pinnacle of his publishing career on the same night that his life goes off the rails—first his book lands on the New York Times bestseller list, and then his wife, Abby, goes missing on her way home. A year later, Grady is a mere shadow of his former self: out of money and out of ideas. So, when his agent, Abby’s godmother, suggests that he spend some time on the Isle of Amberly, in a log cabin left to her by one of her writers, it seems as good a plan as any. With free housing for himself and his dog and a beautiful, distraction-free environment, maybe he can finally complete the next novel. But from the very beginning, Grady’s experiences with Amberly seem weird, if not downright ominous: As a visitor, he’s not allowed to bring his car onto the island; the local businesses are only open for a few hours at a time; and there are no birds. At all. Not to mention the skeletal hand he finds buried under the floorboards of the cabin, the creepy harmonica music in the woods, and the occasional sighting of a woman in a red coat who’s a dead ringer for Abby. As Grady falls deeper and deeper into insomnia and alcoholism, he begins to realize his being on the island is no accident—and that should make him very afraid. Through occasional chapters from before Abby’s disappearance, told from her point of view, we learn that Grady is not necessarily a reliable narrator, and the book’s slow unfolding of dread, mystery, and then truth is both creative and well-paced. Every chapter heading is an oxymoron, like the title, reminding us of the contradictions at the heart of every story.
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781250337788
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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