An episodic, felony-strewn stroll down Memory Lane.
Now that he’s retired, DI Henry Christie finally gets a chance to close one of his very first cases.
It’s 1985, and PC Christie is at the point of taking in Thomas Benemy, who's clearly shoplifting perfumes to order on a grand scale even though he’s only 13, when he’s coshed from behind and wakes up to find Tommy and his unidentified accomplice gone. Shortly after Henry pays a call on Trish Benemy, Tommy’s hard-used mother, her son disappears, never to be seen again. The following year, Henry, now a newly minted Detective Constable, is called on the carpet as the likeliest person to have passed a pair of suspects in the abduction and murder of two children the tools they used to end their lives in the nick. It’s not until 2020, when he signs a six-month contract to serve as a Civilian Investigator with the Blackpool CID’s Cold Case Unit, that the threads begin to come together. First Henry gets to hear the scarifying source of the scars that disfigure the body of his sergeant, Debbie Blackstone. Then he learns of the suicide of Trish Benemy, which turns out to be murder. He and Blackstone close in on Ellis Clanfield, a serial rape suspect who has the same unusual tattoo that Henry remembers Tommy sporting, only to see him snatched from custody by sexy solicitor Hortense Thorogood. Incredible as it seems, things rapidly get even worse before all the loose ends (and there are many) are tied up.
An episodic, felony-strewn stroll down Memory Lane.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-5014-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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