Satisfyingly twisty, highly educational, and lots of fun.
An old-fashioned detective novel set in 1940s San Francisco, with an injection of contemporary concerns.
In her fiction debut, Chua, best known for Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011) and several books about immigration and politics, pays tribute to the mystery novels she loved growing up, incorporating extensive research on topics ranging from the architecture of San Francisco to the Chinese Exclusion Act to the biographies of Wendell Willkie and Madame Chiang Kai-shek. When presidential hopeful Walter Wilkinson is found shot dead with his pants down in his room at the Claremont Hotel, the prime suspects are three young women: Isabella Stafford and her cousins, Nicole and Cassie Bainbridge. Unfortunately, the Mexican housekeeper who saw one of them coming out of Wilkinson’s room can’t tell one blond white girl from another. On the case is hard-boiled homicide detective Al Sullivan, originally Alejo Gutiérrez, a member of the Berkeley police force who is half Mexican, half Nebraskan, and part Jewish on his Mexican side, who's been passing as white for many years. Among the many complications he faces in his investigation is the fact that Isabella’s 7-year-old sister, Iris, died at the Claremont 10 years earlier under circumstances that remain unclear. The novel opens with the deposition of the girls’ grandmother, Genevieve Bainbridge, who controls the fortune to which they are heir. She’s been told that if she doesn’t give up the killer, all three will take the rap—and while she won’t do that, she has plenty to reveal, and her testimony is parceled out in sections throughout the book. The many threads of the plot as well as the author's concerns about race, class, and other matters come together in the cleverly imagined character and voice of her detective.
Satisfyingly twisty, highly educational, and lots of fun.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781250903600
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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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