The busiest, saddest, untidiest village mystery ever.
Retired Det. Superintendent Henry Christie, taken off the shelf again to question a suspect who won’t speak to anyone else, finds himself investigating a rash of crimes committed before he was born.
When Celia Twain discovers her husband’s corpse only a few hours after she’d publicly threatened to kill him over his adultery, the Kendleton constabulary are naturally interested. Since Celia refuses to talk to anyone but Henry, who’s been around forever, DS Rik Dean offers him 500 pounds for a day’s work getting her statement, which naturally doesn’t include a confession of murder. Meantime, things have heated up dramatically in the village. Although James Twain had plenty of enemies, the news that he was a business partner of Marcus Durham, whose bullet-riddled body was recently found in his own swimming pool, strongly suggests that the same person may have killed them both. A group of young toughs have attacked wheelchair-bound Veronica Gough, and one of them has tried to drown her. Then several of them break into her house, and one of them threatens her with violence, triggering her memory of her rape by another villager during the celebrations of VE-Day in 1945. The more closely Henry, now awarded the nonce title of Civilian Senior Investigating Officer, looks into the past, the more convinced he becomes that Veronica’s memories may hold the key to a pair of unsolved murders committed even earlier, back in 1941. As DS Debbie Blackstone, Henry’s old boss in the Lancaster Cold Case Unit, observes, “It’s all about people taking things from other people.” Even as Henry is making arrests, Oldham continues to multiply complications in the final chapter, and the story ends with quite a cliffhanger.
The busiest, saddest, untidiest village mystery ever.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-44830-694-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.
A routine break-in at the home of Sûreté homicide chief Armand Gamache leads slowly but surely to the revelation of a potentially calamitous threat to all Québec.
At first it seems as if nothing at all triggered the burglar alarm at Gamache’s home in Three Pines; it was literally a false alarm. It’s not till he receives a package containing his summer jacket that Gamache realizes someone really did get into his house, choosing to steal exactly this one item and return it with a cryptic note referring to “some malady…water” and “Angelica stems.” Having already refused to meet with Jeanne Caron, chief of staff to Marcus Lauzon, a powerful politician who’s already taken vengeance on Gamache and his family for not expunging his child’s criminal record, Gamache now agrees to meet with Charles Langlois, a marine biologist with ties to Caron who confesses to a leading role in stealing Gamache’s jacket. Their meeting ends inconclusively for Gamache, who’s convinced that Langlois is hiding something weighty, and all too conclusively for Langlois, who’s killed by a hit-and-run driver as he leaves. The news that Langlois had been investigating a water supply near the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups sends Gamache scurrying off to the abbey, where the plot steadily thickens until he’s led to ask how “an old recipe for Chartreuse” can possibly be connected to “a terrorist plot to poison Québec’s drinking water.” That’s a great question, and answering it will take the second half of this story, which spins ever more intricate connections among leading players that become deeply unsettling.
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781250328137
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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