A somber, readable tale of frontier psychodrama.
Falconer’s whodunit, set in 19th-century Sydney Cove, New South Wales, stars a haunted, hard-drinking investigator.
It’s 1875, and Inspector Cormag Macleod is a gruff, older, haunted man who can handle himself in a back-alley brawl. Macleod spends much of the book hung over and likes brooding over his pipe. He’s a bit rancorous as the novel opens. Not only must he trek out to Allynbrook to investigate a murder, but he’s saddled with Constable McDermott, a helper/watcher who’s barely 20. At Allynbrook, this odd couple finds a clue—a leather disc with a distinctive brand that leads them even further into the hinterland, to small subsistence farms. As Macleod and McDermott make their way to a distant property called Ravenscroft (“a lovely place, sitting high atop the hill with the river winding around it”), they encounter an entire cast of hardscrabble farmers raising pigs and growing tobacco and wheat, living day to day. Most of them harbor secrets of some kind. The pair encounters ferocious storms, murders, and a crazed kind of butchery that seems to verge well beyond the human realm in its depravity; it all leads to a vivid, brutal climax. Falconer draws this provincial world well, although the book’s most memorable creation is Macleod himself, a hard man with a soft heart and a jaded worldview (“Most of the evil in this world is in men,” he tells McDermott, in answer to a question about whether or not he believes in ghosts, “we don’t need spirits for evil to be close to us”). The prose is often distractingly purple (“He saw colleagues and friends, those who where succumbing to their injuries slowly, as the tide of blood ebbed from them, their lives slipping away,” and so on), but the dark atmosphere carries the reader along.
A somber, readable tale of frontier psychodrama.Pub Date: June 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-72493-553-3
Page Count: 318
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Two rewarding cases don’t amount to overkill at all.
Arizona cybersecurity CFO Ali Reynolds juggles two far-flung cases—the murder of her husband’s former business partner in Washington and the stalking of her salesperson in California—that both strike uncomfortably close to home.
Talk about overkill. The night of his 60th birthday party, Video Games International owner Charles Brewster is murdered, stabbed 17 times while his second wife, Clarice, lies sleeping next to him in bed. Det. Raymond Horn, of Edmonds PD Homicide, wastes no time arresting Clarice, who admits she must have killed the husband who’d filed for divorce even though she can’t remember a thing about it. Adam Brewster, who’d left his father’s home 20 years earlier over his discovery that Chuck was sleeping with his first wife’s friend Clarice and Chuck’s discovery that Adam was gay, is sickened by the crime, which took place hours after his reconciliation with his father. So is B. Simpson, who’d co-founded VGI with Chuck. Ali, B.’s wife and partner in High Noon Enterprises, is convinced that Donna Jean Plummer—the longtime Brewster housekeeper the cops are trying to tie to the murder along with Clarice—is innocent, so she sets up a serious lawyer for Donna Jean. In the meantime, High Noon’s Camille Lee spots a suspicious man during a sales trip to Los Angeles and is convinced that he’s spotted her too. With the help of Frigg, High Noon’s AI, Camille and Ali identify the suspect as Bulgarian trafficker Bogdan Petrov. But what designs could he possibly have on Camille? As usual, the reliable Jance emphasizes methodical investigative work and domestic subplots over splashy surprises.
Two rewarding cases don’t amount to overkill at all.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781668035788
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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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