Well-written, character-driven portrait of small-town New England meets Silence of the Lambs. Strong stomach a plus.
A British novelist turned Maine police detective finds himself investigating a horrific murder.
Nichols follows up his innovative novel The Rocks (2015) with a more familiar type of thriller. In its opening scene we meet three teenage boys, gleefully skateboarding the nighttime streets of sleepy Granite Harbor. When Shane splits off from the group, an observer in a pickup truck rolls after him, a montage of images racing through his brain. “He was beneath the small blond girl riding him like a rocking horse....He was pinned to the ground as boys and girls spread their legs above him....In the woods with Ivan, the Master...[t]he hanging coyote was speaking his name....In his mouth he tasted the bitter pus....” Think we might have a serial killer on our hands? Very soon we will learn the horrific details of his murderous routine, as will Det. Alex Brangwen, the interesting Brit at the center of the novel’s large, well-developed ensemble cast. As Alex was beginning a successful writing career in the U.K.—he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize—his pregnant American wife, truly a bitch on wheels, insisted on moving home to have her baby. Maine, she decided, telling Alex it was beautiful, full of writers, and he’d love it there. But, unfortunately, things went south with both the marriage and his third novel, and he ended up working at the local police department, whose chief, Belinda “Billie” Raintree, had read his books and thought the skill set would translate. Now Shane’s desecrated body turns up on the grounds of the Settlement, a local archaeological site where many locals work as historic re-enactors, Goody this and Goodman that. Shane was a friend of Alex’s now-teenage daughter Sophie, and she and the other two skateboarders become even more alienated from their parents after the murder—particularly problematic because Mr. Weirdo still has them in his sights.
Well-written, character-driven portrait of small-town New England meets Silence of the Lambs. Strong stomach a plus.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250894816
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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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