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MISSING WHITE WOMAN

Clunky prose and illogical plot holes will disappoint Garrett’s fans.

Garrett’s latest thriller targets the insidious impact of influencer culture, as seen through the eyes of a Black woman.

Baltimore-based Breanna Wright is at the “let’s take a trip” stage in her budding relationship with Ty Franklin, her first serious boyfriend in more than a decade. When he invites her to spend a long weekend with him at a luxurious Airbnb townhouse in Jersey City, where his company is based, Bree jumps at the chance. But her romantic getaway turns into a nightmare when Bree descends the stairs on her final morning to discover the bloodied body of a white woman in the foyer and Ty gone. Could the victim be Janelle Becket, a beautiful blond dog walker whose disappearance the previous week has dominated the video postings of TikTok makeup influencer Billie Regan? When the police question Bree, she is frozen with fear—the result of a traumatic encounter with law enforcement years earlier—until Adore Smith, her estranged college best friend turned successful attorney, sweeps in to take charge. Garrett does a good job of capturing the online mob mentality that explodes as suspicion falls on both the missing Ty (“A dead white woman. A missing Black man”) and on Bree (who gets doxxed in an act of guilt by association). But what could have been a razor-sharp, suspenseful tale about racial profiling gets bogged down in a plodding storyline that follows Bree as she checks in and out of hotels, sleuths by scrolling social media on her phone, and indulges in banal conversations with Uber drivers and hotel clerks. Bree is also a frustrating protagonist who continually ignores her friend’s smart advice; indeed, the stylish and ambitious Adore is the most compelling and vividly drawn character in the novel.

Clunky prose and illogical plot holes will disappoint Garrett’s fans.

Pub Date: April 30, 2024

ISBN: 9780316256971

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024

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CLOSE TO DEATH

Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.

What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.

Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.

Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.

Pub Date: April 16, 2024

ISBN: 9780063305649

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024

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YOU'D LOOK BETTER AS A GHOST

Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.

Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.

While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.

Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.

Pub Date: April 16, 2024

ISBN: 9780143136170

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Penguin

Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024

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