A thoughtful, compelling mystery and a complex look at how generational trauma continues to reverberate.
A therapist must solve the murder of one of her patients in Berlin’s mystery novel.
Seattle indie rock star Amy Nguyen has just died. Her death is ruled a suicide, but her therapist, Jackie Kessler, thinks she was murdered, and she’s running out of time to prove it—Amy’s family is suing her for wrongful death. Jackie recruits her friend’s son, Allan, a former police detective, to help her investigate. Jackie feels especially connected to Amy because their families have similar backgrounds—they come from generations of war refugees from Asia (Korea and Vietnam, respectively). As Amy observes, “My parents and older sister were boat people who barely made it to a refugee camp in Thailand. I’m the first member of the family born in the States. Some of that residual pain and suffering got handed down.” The narrative is peppered with flashbacks to Jackie’s sessions with Amy, which illustrate that Jackie and Amy had known each other for a long time, and that Amy, while troubled, was not suicidal. Allan pushes Jackie to explain how she knows Amy wasn’t suicidal, but talking about Amy goes against Jackie’s obligation to keep her clients’ secrets confidential. She may have to talk, though; Amy’s bandmates think she was murdered, too, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to prove it without digging into Amy’s life. This process makes Jackie rethink her own family trauma. The story is framed around Amy’s murder, but it’s really about Jackie; every time she learns something new about what was going on with Amy, she connects it back to her own experience and the generational trauma in her own family. The narrative doesn’t wallow; Jackie also has a supportive network of friends (and a caring husband) who help her and are integral to the narrative. Sometimes the author introduces characters or pieces of information without immediately explaining how they connect to the story, which creates some confusion and distance—the “whodunnit” aspect will keep readers turning the pages, though.
A thoughtful, compelling mystery and a complex look at how generational trauma continues to reverberate.Pub Date: March 8, 2024
ISBN: 9798989893805
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.
The feds must protect an accused criminal and an orphaned girl.
Maybe you’ve met him before as protagonist of The 6:20 Man (2022): Ex-Army Ranger Travis Devine, who’d had the dubious fortune to tangle with “the girl on the train,” is now assigned by his homeland security boss to protect Danny Glass, who's awaiting trial on multiple RICO charges in Washington state. Devine has what it takes: He “was a closer, snooper, fixer, investigator,” and, when necessary, a killer. These skills are on full display as the deaths of three key witnesses grind justice to a temporary halt. Glass has a 12-year-old niece, Betsy Odom, and each is the other’s only living relative—her parents recently died of an apparent drug overdose. The FBI has temporary guardianship of Betsy, who's a handful. She tells Travis that though she’s not yet 13, she's 28 in “life-shit years.” The financially well-heeled Glass wants to be her legal guardian with an eye to eventual adoption, but what are his real motives? And what happens to her if he's convicted? Meanwhile, Betsy insists that her parents never touched drugs, and she begs Travis to find out how they really died. This becomes part of a mission that oozes danger. The small town of Ricketts has a woman mayor who’s full of charm on the surface, but deeply corrupt and deadly when crossed. She may be linked to a subversive group called "12/24/65," as in 1865, when the Ku Klux Klan beast was born. Blood flows, bombs explode, and people perish, both good guys and not-so-good guys. Readers might ponder why in fiction as well as in life, it sometimes seems necessary for many to die so one may live. And what about the girl on the train? She's not necessary to the plot, but she's a fun addition as she pops in and out of the pages, occasionally leaving notes for Travis. Maybe she still wants him dead.
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781538757901
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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