A richly atmospheric thriller with a plucky heroine.
When a man arrives at a North Carolina mountain hotel looking for clues to his journalist brother’s recent disappearance, the trail that he and the inn’s young manager start to follow leads them back to a sequence of unsolved cases, decades apart, that involve other missing hikers and that may be rooted in the town’s deepest secrets.
Labeled by the national press as “the most dangerous town in North Carolina,” Cutter’s Pass is a pretty place in which hikers have over the years had a tendency to vanish. There were the Fraternity Four, as a group of students came to be called, who disappeared in 1997; Alice Kelly in 2012; Farrah Jordan in 2019; and Landon West in 2022. To Abby Lovett, however, Cutter’s Pass, and in particular the town’s hotel, the Passage Inn, has become her adopted home and her refuge from a troubled past. As manager of the inn, Abby has come to know everybody, to love the wild mountain trails, and to learn that appearances can be deceptive. “Things here were designed to appear more fragile than they were,” she notes of the inn’s folksy touches, “but reinforced, because they had to be. We lived in the mountains, on the edge of the woods, subject to the whims of weather and the forces of nature.” In economical yet elegant descriptions, author Miranda repeatedly conjures up this untamed natural world even as she unspools a labyrinthine plot that has its roots in the distant past but that originates in the present when Trey West appears one stormy night at the Passage Inn. “He believed he could find them all,” Abby realizes when she and Trey, drawn to each other and into the quest for Trey’s missing brother, find a clue that links the most recent mystery to each of the ones that went before. The novel’s characters are deftly sketched and its suspense is nicely tightened, though the plot finally loses itself somewhat in a tangle of strained connections.
A richly atmospheric thriller with a plucky heroine.Pub Date: July 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982147-31-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.
The loss of her police officer father and the discovery of an abandoned car in a local lake raise chilling questions regarding a young woman’s family history.
When Hazel Sharp returns to her hometown of Mirror Lake, North Carolina, for her father’s memorial, she and the other townspeople are confronted by a challenging double whammy: As they’re grieving the loss of beloved longtime police officer Detective Perry Holt, a disturbing sight appears in the lake, whose waterline is receding because of an ongoing drought—an old, unidentifiable car, which has likely been lurking there for years. Hazel temporarily leaves her Charlotte-based building-renovation business in the capable hands of her partners and reconnects with her brothers, Caden and Gage; her Uncle Roy; her old fling and neighbor, Nico; and her schoolfriend, Jamie, now a mother and married to Caden. Tiny, relentless suspicions rise to the metaphorical surface along with that waterlogged vehicle: There have been a slew of minor break-ins; two people go missing; and then, a second abandoned car is discovered. The novel digs deeper into Hazel’s family history—her father was a widow when he married Hazel’s mother, who later left the family, absconding with money and jewels—and Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation: “Everything mattered disproportionately in a small town. Your success, but also your failure. Everyone knows might as well have been our town motto.”
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668010440
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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