Endless skeletons in the family closet, all disclosed by a protagonist who makes one reckless move after another.
In a dramatic change from Angoe’s trilogy about professional assassin Nina Knight, a disgraced daughter returns to her South Carolina family to find that it’s in even bigger trouble than she thought.
Jacinda Brodie has already had quite the day before she learns of her beloved grandfather’s heart attack. Conrad Meckleson, her ex-mentor and ex-lover, has persuaded the D.C. college where she’s a teaching assistant to deny her a research fellowship she thought was in the bag. And he’s landed a fat contract for a book he hopes will return him to bestseller lists, a story based on family secrets she confided in him, the most shocking of which is that Jac pushed her father, Brook Haven police chief Montavious Brodie Jr., over a cliff to his death. Resolved that her story is hers alone, Jac lets herself into Meckleson’s place, packs up the notes he’s taken over the years, and dashes off a series of bridge-burning emails to the college administrators on her way out the door. Back home in Brook Haven, things are even worse. Her grandfather, Montavious Brodie Sr., the only family member who hasn’t judged Jac harshly, dies shortly after her arrival, leaving her to solace herself with old school friends Sawyer Okoye, now an administrator for the police, and Nicolas Tate, the mayor’s son. Jac instantly takes against Faye Arden, the mayor’s pushy fiancee, who’s renovating the notorious Murder Manor, where the caretaker reportedly killed over a dozen victims 50 years ago, into Moor Manor. Her granddad’s heart attack, Jac decides, was engineered by Faye. Just in case the enmity between the two women isn’t fierce enough, Meckleson pops up to accuse Jac of theft.
Endless skeletons in the family closet, all disclosed by a protagonist who makes one reckless move after another.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781662508332
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
A promising blueprint for a book that didn’t quite get written.
When their father dies on the cliffs of his California estate, estranged half-siblings unite to investigate possible foul play.
As Dave’s seventh novel opens, the reader learns something the characters don’t know: Hotel magnate Liam Noone did not fall by accident. He was pushed—by whom and for what reason are unclear. The police have deemed it an accident and closed the case, but his son, Sam, is not so sure. Though he hasn’t seen his half sister, Nora, in years, he shows up at her workplace in New York to ask her to go with him to California to investigate. This part of the story is told by Nora in the first person. We get a lot of information about Nora—she has recently lost both parents, she’s an authority on neuroarchitecture, she is engaged to a New York chef but has an ex in the wings—but somehow don’t get much of a feel for her as a person as she and Sam race around investigating leads and having defensive, snappy conversations. A second narrative thread begins 50 years in the past and follows the development of a romance between Liam and a woman named Cory, who is not one of his three ex-wives, nor is she a woman named Cece with whom he had a mysterious connection. The novel relies on the tension created by all these missing puzzle pieces to plunge swiftly forward, but there’s nothing really at stake—no strong suspects, no wrongly accused, no contested inheritance; it’s all just digging up the secrets of a dead person so his children can understand him now that it’s too late. Actually, nobody really understands each other in this book, and as the characters suspiciously keep each other at arm’s length, the effect extends to the reader as well. Other potentially interesting topics—neuroarchitecture (designing spaces that support emotional well-being), the high-end hotel business—are similarly set up but not explored.
A promising blueprint for a book that didn’t quite get written.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781668002933
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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