A well-crafted and immersive paranormal mystery with a Southern accent.
A theater manager must survive the murders plaguing her small-town production in Drago’s supernatural mystery, the latest novel in the Crow Creek series.
Gabriela Rossi is the new stage manager of the Orpheum Theater in Crow Creek, North Carolina. The Italian transplant is not well liked by her colleagues, partly because she was promoted to her current position after a relatively short time at the theater. When the company’s producer is stabbed to death just days before the start of the new show, Bury Me in Autumn, the cast and crew are suspects. Gabriela is especially disturbed because, seconds before the producer’s body was found, she saw a ghost in the theater with a scar on his neck. “Beware the wolf’s mouth,” the ghost warned her. “He rises in the wolf’s mouth.” Crow Creek Sheriff Brad Gleason is on the case, and he’s happy to spend more time around Gabriela. There’s also Becky Stokes, a local reporter foaming at the mouth to cover the case. As more bodies start to pile up, the mystery becomes increasingly complex. Gabriela finds evidence of ancient rituals linked to the cult of Dionysus that call for sacrifice in the name of the dramatic tragedy. Drago’s prose is crisp and creepy, and he does a fine job incorporating the language and ethos of the theater: “When the doors open, the buzz of the invites bleeds into the house. Gabriela manages a grin. Previews should be exciting. They finally get to show off what they’ve been working on for six weeks. Isn’t that the purpose of theatre? The reason for art?” The premise gives the author an abundance of suspects and victims, and Drago keeps the reader guessing with a number of turns and reversals. A few elements ring a bit false—Gabriela’s frequent reversion to Italian words feels a bit forced—but in general, the mix of small-town claustrophobia, theatrical egos, and ancient mythology makes for an entertaining and surprisingly dark tale.
A well-crafted and immersive paranormal mystery with a Southern accent.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-63796-9
Page Count: 305
Publisher: Gold Avenue Press
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.
Unbeknownst to each other, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett and outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski embark on equally urgent pursuits that converge in a way neither of them suspects.
Nate, who’s been off the grid ever since his wife, Liv, was killed in a fire intended to kill him too in Three-Inch Teeth (2024), has sworn vengeance on murderous conspirator Axel Soledad. After shooting several of Soledad’s hirelings, he joins forces with his friend and fellow Special Forces vet Geronimo Jones, who’s tracked him down, to chase his quarry deep into the woods. Governor Spencer Rulon, meanwhile, has pressed Joe into service once again to find veteran hunting guide Spike Rankin and his new assistant, Mark Eisele, who just happens to be Rulon’s son-in-law. Although nobody’s heard from the men for two days, the governor doesn’t want his wife and daughter to know they’re missing, and that means not alerting the media or the local sheriff, who’s no fan of Rulon’s anyway. Readers who’ve already seen Rankin and Eisele overpowered and imprisoned by a mysterious crew they ran into while they were setting up for the elk hunting season will assume that Soledad is behind their kidnapping as well. But Box will keep everyone guessing about exactly how Soledad and the ragtag military cult he’s gathered around him plan to confront the military-industrial complex he’s persuaded them is a clear and present danger. You know you’re in for a wild ride when Joe, saying goodbye to Marybeth, his long-suffering wife, promises her, “I’ll do my job and not cross the line.”
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851050
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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