A compulsively readable story of a long-buried disappearance.
In Cain’s debut mystery, a pair of podcasters investigate an unsolved crime involving a once-famous singer.
The action of this Florida-set novel is divided between the modern world of podcasts and social media and the world of working musicians in 1969. In 2019, Jacksonville-based Melody Hinterson and her producer, Dorian Santos, are the creators of the Tabs and Blanks Podcast, dedicated to piecing together the facts of cold cases. As the story opens, the case in question is that of Betty Van Disson, who disappeared in Northeast Florida in 2001 without a trace. Her husband, Randell, refused to cooperate with authorities, and she was never seen again. When the team learns of the existence of Betty’s diaries, the narrative splits to dramatize the tale of her romance with charismatic R&B musician Dominicus Owen and his band, the Downtown Sound. Cain does a deft job of balancing the past and present threads of her narrative, investing each with its own drama, whether it’s the escalating romantic tension between Melody and Dorian in the present or the story of Betty, starting when she was 17-year-old Betty Langdon at a concert on the Florida/Georgia line, back in 1969, and following her life through the ensuing years. Throughout, Cain effectively evokes the atmosphere of rural Florida and Jacksonville (“It has its problems, people hate its name, progress sometimes gets buried in a quagmire murky as any Florida swamp”), as well as the local R&B and rock music scene. This latter is embodied in the tale of the rise of the Downtown Sound and the early days of Dominicus’ stardom, and Cain ably and steadily ratchets up the suspense as more revelations come to light. Overall, the novel manages to get across the flavor of Florida’s music and the grimness of Betty’s life with smooth skill.
A compulsively readable story of a long-buried disappearance.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-949935-38-7
Page Count: 482
Publisher: Orange Blossom Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.
A routine break-in at the home of Sûreté homicide chief Armand Gamache leads slowly but surely to the revelation of a potentially calamitous threat to all Québec.
At first it seems as if nothing at all triggered the burglar alarm at Gamache’s home in Three Pines; it was literally a false alarm. It’s not till he receives a package containing his summer jacket that Gamache realizes someone really did get into his house, choosing to steal exactly this one item and return it with a cryptic note referring to “some malady…water” and “Angelica stems.” Having already refused to meet with Jeanne Caron, chief of staff to Marcus Lauzon, a powerful politician who’s already taken vengeance on Gamache and his family for not expunging his child’s criminal record, Gamache now agrees to meet with Charles Langlois, a marine biologist with ties to Caron who confesses to a leading role in stealing Gamache’s jacket. Their meeting ends inconclusively for Gamache, who’s convinced that Langlois is hiding something weighty, and all too conclusively for Langlois, who’s killed by a hit-and-run driver as he leaves. The news that Langlois had been investigating a water supply near the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups sends Gamache scurrying off to the abbey, where the plot steadily thickens until he’s led to ask how “an old recipe for Chartreuse” can possibly be connected to “a terrorist plot to poison Québec’s drinking water.” That’s a great question, and answering it will take the second half of this story, which spins ever more intricate connections among leading players that become deeply unsettling.
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781250328137
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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
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