A well-paced and creepy novel with a strong message.
A taut psychological thriller set in the eerie remnants of an abandoned asylum.
In 2012,Kyle Hampton leads a happy life with his wife and young daughter, but he’s plagued by memories of his childhood in Rose Hill Asylum, where he was born. There, abuse was rampant, and scores of children died over the years before it was shut down 28 years ago. Many years later, he and his best friend, Randy, a fellow former asylum resident, still find themselves drawn back to the closed-down building, which retains its sinister atmosphere. Lawrence paints these visits vividly, and the asylum itself becomes the work’s most fully realized locale as the friends’ visits become increasingly unsettling. Throughout, the author also successfully intersperses this story with Kyle’s troubling recollections—particularly of his encounters with bullies and of the fact that his younger brother, Roy, was not adopted with him; Kyle escaped the brutal asylum, but his sibling didn’t, leaving him guilt-ridden. There’s an underdeveloped plotline involving Kyle’s difficult relationship with his wife, as well. However, Lawrence also takes readers into the mind of a serial killer known as Stitches—a man who haunts the asylum, dressed as a clown, and currently preys upon local women; as the killer slowly makes his existence known to Kyle, a tense cat-and-mouse game plays out. The author manages to keep the villain shrouded in mystery by carefully unveiling his connections to the asylum over the course of the story. Throughout the novel, including in Stitches’ horrific monologues, the author presents a searing indictment of the mental health and asylum system in the United States over several decades. Action scenes dominate the work’s latter sections, but the novel’s strongest aspects are its forbidding atmosphere and its damning depiction of what happens to kids who fall through cracks in the system.
A well-paced and creepy novel with a strong message.Pub Date: March 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-50-923522-3
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.
Stephanie Plum’s 31st adventure shows that Trenton’s preeminent fugitive-apprehension agent still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve, and needs every one of them.
The current caseload for Stephanie and Lula—the ex-prostitute file clerk at her cousin Vincent Plum’s bail bonds company, who serves as her unflappable sidekick—begins with two “failures to appear.” Eugene Fleck is suspected of being Robin Hoodie, who robs from the rich and, yes, distributes the proceeds to the poor. Racketeer Bruno Jug, who’s missed his court date on charges of tax evasion, is also suspected of drugging and raping a 14-year-old. But neither of these fugitives can hold a candle to Zoran Djordjevic, aka Fang, a self-proclaimed vampire wanted in connection with the gruesome fate of his late wife and three other missing women. As usual, Stephanie’s personal life is just as helter-skelter as her professional life as a bounty hunter. She’s managed to get herself engaged both to Det. Joe Morelli, of the Trenton PD, and Ranger, a former Special Forces agent who runs a private security firm; she thinks she may be pregnant; and she’s willing to marry the father, whichever of her fiances that turns out to be. On top of it all, her nothingburger schoolmate Herbert Slovinski suddenly pops up at one of the funerals she ferries her Grandma Mazur to, hitting on her relentlessly and gilding his importunities by cleaning and painting her shabby apartment and laying new carpet. Luckily, Lula’s on hand to offer cupcakes that stave off the worst disasters, and whenever this hodgepodge threatens to slow down, another FTA appears, or fails to appear.
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781668003138
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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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