Choice Nordic noir featuring a pressure-cooker scenario, gripping action, and nerve-wracking psychological tension.
A Danish detective is blackmailed into exacting vigilante justice in Krefeld’s thriller.
Inspector Cecilie Mars is a Copenhagen police detective with impressive sleuthing instincts, a barren personal life, an intermittent drug habit, and nightmares of past trauma. One night, as she’s tailing a rape suspect, she sees his car crash, struggles with him after he attacks her, and improperly flees the scene; after he turns up dead, Cecilie receives a video of the encounter edited to appear that she killed him. “Lazarus,” the anonymous maker of the video, threatens to publicize it unless she agrees to carry out his agenda to kill rapists and murderers who got off with light sentences courtesy of Denmark’s lax justice system (and who are presumably plotting new crimes). Her involvement grows deeper and bloodier with each assignment until Lazarus tasks her with killing her own rapist, a man who assaulted her when she was 17 and has now kidnapped a new victim. This tortuous situation ties Cecilie up in moral knots: The monsters Lazarus has her hunting must be stopped, yet she’s also committing serious offenses—and probably being set up by Lazarus to be framed for murder. In Giles’ deft English translation, Krefeld’s tale is an intricate police procedural, taut with intrigue that explodes into terrifying violence, and a gritty depiction of a far-from-quaint Copenhagen characterized by cynical legal bureaucrats, grim concrete high-rises, and menacing street gangs. The prose is energetic and colorful, even Wagnerian at times—“You shall be my thrall in Valhalla!” thunders one psycho as he prepares to sacrifice a woman to Odin—but equally adept at evoking the queasy, claustrophobic feeling of victimization (revisiting her attack, Cecilie bleakly recalls “[t]he smell of urine emanating from him, mixing with the stench of the dumpsters. His limpness. The many slaps to her face that he delivered, slowly making him hard and ready.”) The result is an engrossing page-turner as Cecilie snakes her way through a seemingly inescapable maze.
Choice Nordic noir featuring a pressure-cooker scenario, gripping action, and nerve-wracking psychological tension.Pub Date: May 1, 2023
ISBN: 978-1039424975
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Podium Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Red-hot storytelling.
Two master storytellers create one explosive thriller.
Mauna Loa is going to blow within days—“the biggest damn eruption in a century”—and John “Mac” MacGregor of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory leads a team trying to fend off catastrophe. Can they vent the volcano? Divert the flow of blistering hot lava? The city of Hilo is but a few miles down the hill from the world’s largest active volcano and will likely be in the path of a 15-foot-high wall of molten menace racing toward them at 50 miles an hour. “You live here, you always worry about the big one,” Mac says, and this could be it. There’s much more, though. The U.S. Army swoops in, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff personally “drafts” Mac into the Army. Then Mac learns the frightening secret of the Army’s special interest in Mauna Loa, and suddenly the stakes fly far, far beyond Hilo. Perhaps they can save the world, but the odds don’t look good. Readers will sympathize with Mac, who teaches surfing to troubled teens and for whom “taking chances is part of his damned genetic code.” But no one takes chances like the aerial cowboy Jake Rogers and the photographer who hires him to fly over the smoldering, burbling, rock-spitting hellhole. Some of the action scenes will make readers’ eyes pop as the tension continues to build. As with any good thriller, there’s a body count, but not all thrillers have blackened corpses surfing lava flows. The story is the brainchild of the late Crichton, who did a great deal of research but died in 2008 before he could finish the novel. His widow handed the project to James Patterson, who weaves Crichton’s work into a seamless summer read.
Red-hot storytelling.Pub Date: June 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780316565073
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
Fine Grisham storytelling that his fans will enjoy.
A descendant of enslaved people fights a Florida developer over the future of a small island.
In 1760, the slave ship Venus breaks apart in a storm on its way to Savannah, and only a few survivors, all Africans, find their way safely to a tiny barrier island between Florida and Georgia. For two centuries, only formerly enslaved people and their descendants live there. A curse on white people hangs over the island, and none who ever set foot on it survive. Its last resident was Lovely Jackson, who departed as a teen in 1955. Today—well, in 2020—a developer called Tidal Breeze wants Florida’s permission to “develop” Dark Isle, which sits within bridge-building distance from the well-established Camino Island. The plot is an easy setup for Grisham, big people vs. little people. Lovely’s revered ancestors are buried on Dark Isle, which Hurricane Leo devastated from end to end. Lovely claims the islet’s ownership despite not having formal title, and she wants white folks to leave the place alone. But apparently Florida doesn’t have enough casinos and golf courses to suit some people. Surely developers can buy off that little old Black lady with a half million bucks. No? How about a million? “I wish they’d stop offering money,” Lovely complains. “I ain’t for sale.” Thus a non-jury court trial begins to establish ownership. The story has no legal fireworks, just ordinary maneuvering. The real fun is in the backstory, in the portrayal of the aptly named Lovely, and the skittishness of white people to step on the island as long as the ancient curse remains. Lovely has self-published a history of the island, and a sympathetic white woman named Mercer Mann decides to write a nonfiction account as well. When that book ultimately comes out, reviewers for Kirkus (and others) “raved on and on.” Don’t expect stunning twists, though early on Dark Isle gives four white guys a stark message. The tension ends with the judge’s verdict, but the remaining 30 pages bring the story to a satisfying conclusion.
Fine Grisham storytelling that his fans will enjoy.Pub Date: May 28, 2024
ISBN: 9780385545990
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
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