A page-turner that places a premium on shocking its readers.
A monstrous criminal descends upon a small town in Clark’s gory thriller.
Six years ago, Elliot Keller raped and murdered three young women in a cabin near Virginia’s Appalachian Trail. Now he’s serving time at the Virginia Maximum Correctional Institution. He’s a smooth-talking, low-maintenance prisoner, which leads to him getting a coveted overnight laundry detail. He plans to escape during one of the prison’s routine night deliveries and sate his appetite for violence. Meanwhile, in the cozy town of Thompson Trails, Virginia, a massive storm approaches. Sheriff Robert Brown makes the rounds, checking in on citizens, including Rick and Donna Welk, who own a series of lakeside cabins near the Appalachian Trail. Although the storm makes the likelihood of anyone renting a cabin slim, Rick and Donna are prepared for anything. Suddenly, a man who calls himself Elias Derringer steps from the wilderness and into their establishment. Rick is hospitable, offering him coffee, but he gets a bad feeling from the stranger. He doesn’t plan to rent a room to him for even one night and instead points him toward the local sheriff to help him continue on through Thompson Trails. When Elias ends up in a cell for the night, overseen by Deputy Darren Rush, his diabolical plan begins. Clark creates a memorable villain in this gripping thriller. Readers learn how Keller, during his childhood, witnessed “unspeakable things” that imprinted on him and inform the sadism that he inflicts on own victims. Clark’s energetic prose intensifies descriptions of brutality: “His head was nothing more than a bloody pulp with a small spot of brain pulsating grotesquely from his frontal lobe.” However, casual thriller fans may find such moments, as well as those depicting sexual violence, gratuitous. The tale works best as an over-the-top horror piece, as no other aspect of the narrative supersedes Clark’s penchant for savagery. The twist ending, however, will strike some readers as unearned moralizing.
A page-turner that places a premium on shocking its readers.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8414142461
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.
Having been falsely convicted of murder himself years ago, prosecutor Rusty Sabich defies common wisdom in defending his romantic partner’s adopted son against the same accusation.
Now 76, Rusty has retired to the (fictitious) Skageon Region in the upper Midwest, far removed from Kindle County, Turow’s Chicago stand-in, where he was a star attorney and judge. Aaron Housley, a Black man raised in a bleached rural environment, has had his troubles, including serving four months for holding drugs purchased by Mae Potter, his erratic, on-and-off girlfriend. Now, after suddenly disappearing to parts unknown with her, he returns alone. When days go by without Mae’s reappearance, it is widely assumed that Aaron harmed her. Why else would he be in possession of her phone? Following the discovery of Mae’s strangled body and incriminating evidence that points to Aaron, Rusty steps in. Opposed in court by the uncontrollable, gloriously named prosecutor Hiram Jackdorp, he fears he’s in a lose-lose situation. If he fails to get Aaron off, which is highly possible, the boy’s mother, Bea, will never forgive him. If Rusty wins the case, the quietly detached Bea—who, like half the town, has secrets—will have trouble living with the unsparing methods Rusty uses to free Aaron. In attempting to match, or at least approach, the brilliance of his groundbreaking masterpiece Presumed Innocent (1987), Turow has his own odds to overcome. No minor achievement like a previous follow-up, Innocent (2010), the new novel is a powerful display of straightforward narrative, stuffed with compelling descriptions of people, places, and the legal process. No one stages courtroom scenes better than this celebrated Chicago attorney. But the book, whose overly long scenes add up to more than 500 pages, mostly lacks the gripping intensity and high moral drama to keep those pages turning. It’s an absorbing and entertaining read, but Turow’s fans have come to expect more than that.
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538706367
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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