An atmospheric, authentically shivery ghost story with criminal trimmings.
Jónasson transports a Reykjavík teacher to a job in faraway Skálar, where she falls under the spell of the place. It’s not a good spell.
“Teacher wanted at the edge of the world” announces the advertisement that lures Una, barely scraping by in her humdrum job, to the Langanes Peninsula at the northeastern tip of Iceland. The town has a population of 10, two of whom need a teacher. Upon her arrival, Una settles into the attic in the house of Salka, whose daughter, Edda, 7, is one of her pupils. The other girl, Kolbrún, is two years older and a good deal harder to reach, maybe because her mother, Inga, is standoffish and her father, the fisherman Kolbeinn, is an indiscriminate flirt. But the girl who gradually comes to overshadow both Una’s pupils is Thrá, who died 60 years ago but who repeatedly, wordlessly appears to Una—and perhaps to other villagers as well, even if they won’t admit it. When one of her two students marks the end of their Christmas concert by collapsing on the church floor and dying of liver failure, Una feels her status in Skálar crumbling, a process that swiftly accelerates when she calls the Reykjavik police to tell them that she’s recognized the missing Patrekur Kristjánsson as someone who turned up at Salka’s door looking for Hjördís, who owns the local guesthouse. So why won’t Salka back up her identification? Why does fishery owner Guffi, the closest thing to a power broker in town, threaten her over what she’s done? And what does all this have to do with the long-dead Thrá?
An atmospheric, authentically shivery ghost story with criminal trimmings.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2507-9373-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
Expert, but unsurprising.
The death of an old friend who was more than a friend sends Dr. Kay Scarpetta down her latest rabbit hole.
If every body tells a story, the corpse of 7-year-old Luna Briley sings the blues. On top of the many signs of ongoing physical abuse, there’s the fatal gunshot wound to her head. Ryder and Piper Briley, the wealthy and powerful parents who didn’t call the police until after their daughter died, insist that Luna’s death was an accident, or maybe a suicide. Scarpetta doesn’t think so, and her refusal to release the body to the Brileys’ hand-picked mortician moves them to legal action against her as Virginia’s chief medical examiner. You’d think it would be a relief to put this case aside for another when Scarpetta’s niece, Secret Service agent Lucy Farinelli, calls her and ferries her by helicopter to an abandoned Oz theme park owned by Ryder Briley, but this one’s even more heartbreaking. Scarpetta is there to examine the body of astrophysicist Sal Giordano, her close friend and former lover, who was evidently kidnapped, held in captivity for several hours, and tossed out of an unidentified aircraft. The leading suspects are the Brileys; Carrie Grethen, Lucy’s sociopathic ex-lover, with whom Scarpetta has repeatedly tangled in the past; and the UFO that dumped Giordano’s body without leaving the usual traces for air-traffic technologies to pick up. The multiple rounds of physical examinations Scarpetta conducts on both victims are every bit as meticulous and gripping as fans would expect; the killer’s identity is neither surprising nor interesting, but Cornwell juggles her trademark forensics, and the paranormal hints she’s become increasingly invested in, more dexterously than usual.
Expert, but unsurprising.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781538770382
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK TO SCREEN
A return to form for this popular author.
Spectral danger and human evil stalk Sager’s latest stalwart heroine.
When Maggie Holt’s father, Ewan, dies, she’s shocked to discover that she has inherited Baneberry Hall. Ewan made his name as a writer—and ruined her life—by writing a supposedly nonfiction account of the terrors their family endured while living in this grand Victorian mansion with a dark history. Determined to find out the truth behind her father’s sensational bestseller, Maggie returns to Baneberry Hall. Horror aficionados will feel quite cozy as they settle into this narrative, and Sager’s fans will recognize a familiar formula. As he has in his previous three novels, the author makes contemporary fiction out of time-honored tropes. Final Girls (2017) remains his most fresh and inventive novel, but his latest is significantly more satisfying than the two novels that followed. Interspersing Maggie’s story with chapters from her father’s book, Sager delivers something like a cross between The Haunting of Hill House and The Amityville Horror with a tough female protagonist. Ewan and Maggie both behave with the dogged idiocy common among people who buy haunted houses, but doubt about the veracity of Ewan’s book and Maggie’s desperate need to understand her own past make them both compelling characters. The ghosts and poltergeist activity Sager conjures are truly chilling, and he does a masterful job of keeping readers guessing until the very end. As was the case with past novels, though—especially The Last Time I Lied (2018)—Sager sets his story in the present while he seems to be writing about the past. For example, when the Holt family moved into Baneberry Hall in 1995 or thereabouts, Ewan—a professional journalist—worked on a typewriter. When Maggie wants to learn more about the history of Baneberry Hall, she drives to the town library instead of going online. Sager is already asking readers to suspend disbelief, and he makes that more difficult because it’s such a jolt when a character pulls out an iPhone or mentions eBay. This is, however, a minor complaint about what is a generally entertaining work of psychological suspense.
A return to form for this popular author.Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4517-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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