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DARKNESS CALLS

AN INSPECTOR CECILIE MARS THRILLER

Choice Nordic noir featuring a pressure-cooker scenario, gripping action, and nerve-wracking psychological tension.

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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

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NEVER FLINCH

Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.

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Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?

In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.

Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.

Pub Date: May 27, 2025

ISBN: 9781668089330

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025

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NIGHTSHADE

As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”

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Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.

Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.

As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”

Pub Date: May 20, 2025

ISBN: 9780316588485

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025

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