A satisfying and thought-provoking mystery with an enthralling cast.
In this novel, the murder of his sister sends a geology professor to California’s High Desert on a mission to gain greater understanding of his sibling and ferret out her killer.
Forty-four-year-old L. Walker Clayborne, professor of geology and geophysics at the University of California, San Diego, was preparing to leave on a sabbatical when he received a call from the sheriff in Yucca Valley informing him of his sister Claire’s murder. Now, he is standing in the valley’s hospital morgue staring at Claire’s battered body, remembering how she received that small scar at the top of her lip. He meets police Det. Rick Bolles, and as they talk, he begins to realize how little he really knows about his rebellious sister. Two weeks later, after a funeral held in Phoenix, where the professor, Claire, and their older brother, Edgar, were raised, Walker heads to Joshua Tree, California. Now that the crime tape has been taken down, he enters Claire’s small cottage for the first time. He will soon embark on an investigative, emotional, and metaphysical journey that will challenge his highly focused, carefully organized persona. He has also unknowingly put his own life in danger. That first day he meets one of Claire’s friends, Kirsten Benninger, who shares her suspicions that the murder has something to do with his sister’s involvement with a group protesting “Universal Waste,” an international corporation planning to build the world’s largest landfill in the desert. But this is just one of many possibilities: Claire served as a counselor at Eagle Mountain prison, worked with drug addicts in rehab, and volunteered at a free health clinic that also helped abused women. The police have made scant progress, leaving the heavy lifting to Walker, aided by a devoted and eclectic circle of Claire’s friends.
Isaak’s meticulously detailed prose is engaging from the get-go in this novel published posthumously. The narrative, albeit a bit overpacked, offers something for almost everyone: the geological history of Yucca Valley, implicit social commentary, metaphysical phenomena, fringe group religious zealousness, and, of course, a basic murder mystery. Walker narrates the tale, and readers quickly learn how amusingly controlled he is: “I had to move all my dental items to the right” of the sink. “No matter how you clean an electric razor there are always little whisker fragments, and I tried to make sure they stayed out of my toothbrush.” But most intriguing are Claire’s friends, who warmly welcome Walker into their fold and ultimately help him unlock the secrets and untapped flexibility of his own psyche. There is computer whiz Mandy Cicerone, who has psychic visions, and the mysteriously captivating Melanie, who describes herself as an occultist and practices wicca on the side. Just outside the friendship circle but critical to the story is the eccentric, eminent physicist Ronald Ettenmoor, who is conducting paranormal experiments. This is an intoxicating mix of characters. The book, which delivers an action-filled climax, provides a compelling study of the dynamics of unique interpersonal relationships.
A satisfying and thought-provoking mystery with an enthralling cast.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 978-1958840085
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Utamatzi Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.
A snap of the yo-yo string yanks Harry Bosch out of retirement yet again.
Los Angeles Councilman Jake Pearlman has resurrected the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit in order to reopen the case of his kid sister, Sarah, whose 1994 murder was instantly eclipsed in the press by the O.J. Simpson case when it broke a day later. Since not even a councilor can reconstitute a police unit for a single favored case, Det. Renée Ballard and her mostly volunteer (read: unpaid) crew are expected to reopen some other cold cases as well, giving Bosch a fresh opportunity to gather evidence against Finbar McShane, the crooked manager he’s convinced executed industrial contractor Stephen Gallagher, his wife, and their two children in 2013 and buried them in a single desert grave. The case has haunted Bosch more than any other he failed to close, and he’s fine to work the Pearlman homicide if it’ll give him another crack at McShane. As it turns out, the Pearlman case is considerably more interesting—partly because the break that leads the unit to a surprising new suspect turns out to be both fraught and misleading, partly because identifying the killer is only the beginning of Bosch’s problems. The windup of the Gallagher murders, a testament to sweating every detail and following every lead wherever it goes, is more heartfelt but less wily and dramatic. Fans of the aging detective who fear that he might be mellowing will be happy to hear that “putting him on a team did not make him a team player.”
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-48565-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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