A fine introduction to Elmwood, which horror fans will find a nice place to visit.
In Karraker’s horror novel, an asylum inmate may hold the key to unsolved murders committed 20 years ago.
In 1999, FBI Special Agent David Nolan visits Green Elm Home to interview Tommy Wilford about a series of unsolved murders in Elmwood, Vermont, which Wilford may have witnessed in 1978, when he was 8 years old. It’s just a formality, Nolan reassures Wilford’s attending physician: “It’s the kind of nothing job that comes up when someone wants a promotion.” Wilford’s story, which involves tentacled monsters, is the same testimony that got him committed long ago, but he’s sticking with it: “I’d say I know a lot of things,” he eerily says. The narrative extends all the way back to 1968 in Vietnam (“A lot of messed up stuff happened there,” Wilford notes. “It’s no wonder some of it followed people home”) and is told from a variety of perspectives, including Wilford’s childhood classmates Elise Smithfield and Will Ross,who survived an initial attack that took the lives of two of Tommy’s childhood tormentors. Are these the “fantastic ravings of a certified lunatic,” as Nolan initially characterizes them, or, in classic horror tradition, is something still out there? It’s too soon to determine if Elmwood will become a destination for horror fans on a par with horror master Stephen King’s Castle Rock, Maine, but in his debut novel, Karraker does an effective job of scene-setting and worldbuilding. Several elements will be familiar to King fans, including childhood horrors, social outcasts and bullies, a fearsome supernatural entity, and gruesome deaths. The various pieces of the puzzle don’t fit together perfectly; how Wilford knows what went on in other people’s homes, for example, is a mystery. However, the book evokes palpable dread and terror, as when one character is described as “frozen in fear, the sanity vanishing from her eyes.”
A fine introduction to Elmwood, which horror fans will find a nice place to visit.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9798987847909
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Gray River Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
