A tantalizing puzzle starring a truly lovable protagonist.
Framed for murder, an optimistic social outcast must prove his innocence.
As the book opens, the collapse of a rugged hillside in Normandy reveals a trio of skeletons who seem to have died in the same place but at different times. Then we flash back to five months earlier, as Jamal Salaoui is attempting to climb “the highest cliff in Europe.” As a Muslim, he’s been a scapegoat his entire life. At the Saint Antoine Therapeutic Institute of Bagnolet, where he works, he’s often unfairly accused of neglecting his teenage clients. When he spots a distressed young woman dangerously close to the cliff’s edge, he’s unable to stop her from leaping to her death. At this point, Jamal, now accused of murder, takes over the narrative. After he ventures down to examine the body, things become more complicated. A woman named Denise and her male companion, whom Jamal dubs Xanax, arrive, eyeing him suspiciously. They’re soon followed by laconic police captain Piroz. A cursory look at the dead woman reveals that she’s naked under her coat and that she’s been raped and that someone had also tried to strangle her. Then an anonymous person mails him newspaper clippings, case notes, and witness statements at the hotel where he's staying, seemingly about the tragedy on the cliff, but when he looks more closely he sees that the article is a decade old. A second flashback spotlights this earlier, identical crime, also investigated by Piroz. As evidence piles up against him, Jamal and intrepid postdoctoral fellow Mona use their wits and the internet to ferret out the real killer. Bussi creates a devilish nesting-doll plot that involves a sudokulike number square, ghosts, and surprising family connections.
A tantalizing puzzle starring a truly lovable protagonist.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60945-612-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: World Noir
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.
Hung out to dry by the elders who betrayed them, a squad of pregnant teens fights back with old magic.
Hendrix has a flair for applying inventive hooks to horror, and this book has a good one, chock-full with shades of V.C. Andrews, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Foxfire, to name a few. Our narrator, Neva Craven, is 15 and pregnant, a fate worse than death in the American South circa 1970. She’s taken by force to Wellwood House in Florida, a secretive home for unwed mothers where she’s given the name Fern. She’ll have the baby secretly and give it up for adoption, whether she likes it or not. Under the thumb of the house’s cruel mistress, Miss Wellwood, and complicit Dr. Vincent, Neva forges cautious alliance with her fellow captives—a new friend, Zinnia; budding revolutionary Rose; and young Holly, raped and impregnated by the very family minister slated to adopt her child. All seems lost until the arrival of a mysterious bookmobile and its librarian, Miss Parcae, who gives the girls an actual book of spells titled How To Be a Groovy Witch. There’s glee in seeing the powerless granted some well-deserved payback, but Hendrix never forgets his sweet spot, lacing the story with body horror and unspeakable cruelties that threaten to overwhelm every little victory. In truth, it’s not the paranormal elements that make this blast from the past so terrifying—although one character evolves into a suitably scary antagonist near the end—but the unspeakable, everyday atrocities leveled at children like these. As the girls lose their babies one by one, they soon devote themselves to secreting away Holly and her child. They get some help late in the game but for the most part they’re on their own, trapped between forces of darkness and society’s merciless judgement.
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780593548981
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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