A remarkable protagonist leads a robust cast in this absorbing tale of self-discovery.
In this dramatic mystery, a teenager stuck in her small New England town takes a closer look at her brother’s fatal car accident.
Jordan Hawkins gives up a full scholarship to stay on her family farm in Asheville, Connecticut. The recent high school graduate puts college on hold, as she’s not sure her parents can handle the farm work without her. It’s only been a month since they lost Clay, Jordan’s older brother, who drove a truck with friends Tim Hatch and Tony Barbo into a tree—likely the result of drinking. Jordan becomes withdrawn and does little more than work at a factory and tend to the cows at home. But she does take some solace in Tim’s cousin Win Hatch, a former Asheville local who graduated from high school over a decade ago and now lives and works in Maine. There’s a chance their physical relationship could turn into something more, but then Jordan learns of Win’s somber past. He’s a recovering alcoholic who’s reputedly served time behind bars. As if that weren’t enough, Tony’s mom files suit against the Hawkins family and demands a much greater settlement than the farm insurance will cover. Townsfolk blame Clay for the others’ deaths, but Jordan has questions: How fast was he driving to cause the truck to burst into flames? When she finally investigates the accident, she somehow links it to an old toxic waste dump site. This shines a light on Asheville’s sordid history and stirs up secrets that some people don’t want unearthed.
Although mystery surrounds the truck accident, Davis’ character-driven story centers on its young protagonist. She’s resilient and sympathetic. Jordan denies herself time to grieve while Tony’s mother and even her own parents seem to forget she’s lost her brother. Jordan’s life gets more complicated later when she faces an important decision that, regardless of anyone else’s input, she must make on her own. The author effectively steeps the narrative in metaphors and analogies, from Jordan’s search for imperfections in bottles at the factory to the book’s title—a real-life place and anomaly in which cars in neutral ostensibly roll uphill. The simple, arresting prose is similarly inspired. Here, Jordan listens at her feuding parents’ bedroom door: “She waited there, crouched until her legs cramped and the cold settled into her bones. She heard her father snoring and her mother weeping, and she went back to bed, but she saw the sky change to a melon color before she fell into an uneasy sleep.” Supporting characters enrich Jordan’s tale and display distinctive personalities, including not-always-likable Win and environmentalist Eugene Martin, who’s keen on a fern species on the Hawkins property. While this cast propels the story, the understated mystery still engages. Readers, for example, know no more than Jordan regarding the fatal accident, and Asheville locals harbor quite a few skeletons. The final act wraps up this enigma without losing sight of the main journey as Jordan hopefully comes to terms with herself and where she wants to be.
A remarkable protagonist leads a robust cast in this absorbing tale of self-discovery.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-956440-06-5
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Madville Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2022
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
Fascinating main characters and a clever plot add up to an exciting read.
A thriller with bloody murders and plenty of suspects and featuring an unlikely partnership between two FBI investigators.
FBI consultant Amos Decker has a lot on his mind. The huge fellow once played for the Cleveland Browns in the NFL until he received a catastrophic brain injury, leaving him with synesthesia; he sees death as electric blue. More pertinent to the plot, he also has hyperthymesia, or spontaneous and highly accurate recall. On the one hand, his memories can be horrible. He’d once come home to find his wife and daughter murdered, dead in pools of blood. Later, he listens helplessly on the telephone while his ex-partner shoots herself in the mouth. On the other hand, his memory helps him solve every case he's given. Now he's sent to Florida with a brand-new partner, Special Agent Frederica White, to investigate the murder of a federal judge. Both partners are pissed at their last-minute pairing, and they immediately see themselves as a bad fit. White is a diminutive Black single mother of two who has a double black belt in karate “because I hate getting my ass kicked.” (The author doesn't mention Decker's race, but since he's being contrasted with his new partner in every way, perhaps readers are expected to see him as White. Clarity would be nice.) Their case is strange: Judge Julia Cummins was stabbed 10 times and her face covered with a mask, while her bodyguard was shot to death. Decker and White puzzle over the “very contrarian crime scene” where two murders seem to have been committed by two different people in the same place. The plot gets complex, with suspects galore. But the interpersonal dynamic between Decker and White is just as interesting as the solution to the murders, which doesn't come easily. At first, they’d like to be done with each other and go their separate ways. But as they work together, their mutual respect rises and—alas—the tension between them fades almost completely. The pair will make a great series duo, especially if a bit of that initial tension between them returns. And Baldacci shouldn’t give Decker a pass on his tortured memories, because readers enjoy suffering heroes. It's not enough that his near-perfect recall helps him in his job.
Fascinating main characters and a clever plot add up to an exciting read.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1982-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
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