Down-to-earth action tackles an otherworldly mystery in this devilishly plausible yarn.
Two desiccated corpses aren’t the strangest discoveries made by archaeologists in this third entry of Preston and Child’s unusual crime series.
Nora Kelly is summoned to her boss’s office at the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute and assigned to investigate the site where an unidentified aircraft, perhaps a UFO, supposedly crashed in 1947. She believes that claims of an alien space landing near Roswell are “wacko.” But billionaire Lucas Tappan has provided a generous grant to the institute, and he specifically wants Nora to lead the expedition because of her reputation. She declines and is fired. So Tappan comes to her directly. But “I can’t put digging up UFOs on my resume,” she tells Skip, her less-skeptical brother. “It’s too weird.” Tappan wears her down and hires them both. Reluctantly she takes a team to the area, where they uncover a pair of corpses buried in New Mexico’s high desert. They notify the police, and FBI agent Corrie Swanson takes on the case because they’re on federal land. But the depression in the sand suggests that the vehicle—a flying saucer, maybe?—had struck the ground at a low angle and skipped repeatedly, like a flat rock across a pond. When they come to a possible final resting place, the archaeologists start digging. Just as they are about to make a shocking discovery, armed men stop them. Whatever is under a couple of meters of earth is a secret the government has closely guarded since the ’40s, and these dudes demonstrate that they will kill intruders on the spot. Kelly and Swanson aren’t friends, but they’ve worked well together ever since they debuted in Old Bones (2019), and they are smart, strong, and appealing protagonists. The story has tension, mystery, murder, and enough romance to give Kelly “a powerful glow, a whole-body tingle.”
Down-to-earth action tackles an otherworldly mystery in this devilishly plausible yarn.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5387-3675-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
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
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
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