ALWAYS THE FIRST TO DIE
By R. J. Jacobs
Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2022. $16.99
J. Jacobs may be an emerging name in the world of crime fiction, but he’s got the bona fides that make for a storied career. A practicing clinical psychologist for nearly twenty years, he completed a postdoctoral residency at Vanderbilt and has a private practice in Nashville. Jacobs has also been a conference speaker and a teacher, and he does PTSD assessments for veterans. He is the author of the critically acclaimed novels And Then You Were Gone (2019) and Somewhere in the Dark (2020). His new one is Always the First to Die.
Following a brief prologue, the book opens on Halloween day—an auspicious occasion amplified further by the Category 4 hurricane that’s just ripped its way through Florida, leaving darkness and destruction in its wake. Desperate mom Lexi is on her way to the infamous Pinecrest Estate in the Keys—a run-down movie set with a haunted history of which she was once a part and which she’d thought she’d left behind. But now her teenage daughter, Quinn, in defiance of her mother, is there assisting in the production of a horror film directed by her controversial grandfather, Rick Plummer, and Lexi needs to bring her back. Of course, it’s not just any horror film; it’s the sequel to the blockbuster slasher Breathless, whose troubled shoot, which Lexi herself took part in as a teenager, rivals that of The Exorcist.
But even after the filming of Breathless was completed, the deaths continued . . . off-screen. One cast member perished in a fiery boat explosion, while others were tormented by unexplained phenomena—including sightings of a mysterious young boy—that plagued the production. Years later, Lexi’s husband, Cam (Rick Plummer’s son and Quinn’s dad) went missing from Pinecrest while at work on a book and has been presumed dead. Given all this, Lexi would have no reason to return were it not for her daughter being in danger. As Lexi nears her destination, she encounters Marla Moretti, Breathless’s leading lady, who had a mental breakdown in the years between the films. Marla claims that Rick tried to kill her by using the storm as cover—and while Lexi is initially skeptical, she soon realizes that somebody is out for blood.
The author cleverly weaves past and present events in a narrative that scatters hints and red herrings like breadcrumbs. Readers can see history repeating itself—or redefining itself—as Lexi struggles to separate reality from suspicion in the fight to save her daughter and their future as a family. Jacobs ups the meta factor by having Lexi hear Cam’s voice in her head, offering a running commentary on the rules and tropes of horror movies. It’s an element that plays surprisingly naturally, given the fact that he was writing a guide to surviving them when he disappeared. But Jacobs grounds the narrative in an exploration of how grief and trauma can manifest differently in people, allowing some to move forward while others remain prisoners of the past.
R.J. Jacobs solidifies his status as a rising star with Always the First to Die, which will appeal to fans of both psychological suspense and horror (not to mention those who simply enjoy a good story well told). With its high-concept premise, abundant cinematic qualities, and complex characterizations, the book is an easy read while offering subtext that lingers long after the last page has been turned. Highly recommended as an addition to your spooky season TBR piles.
—John B. Valeri
CHRYSALIS
By Lincoln Child
New York: Doubleday, 2022. $29.00
Lincoln Child is perhaps best known for his collaborations with fellow New York Times bestselling author Douglas Preston, most notably on their long-running Agent Pendergast series. But readers who have just stuck to their coauthored books, fantastic though they are, do themselves a serious disservice.
Child’s Jeremy Logan may not get the fanfare of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher or Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne, but he is no less deserving of it. Logan, a Yale professor and self-described “enigmalogist,” is a master at investigating phenomena that defy explanation. While his adventures—this is book 6 of the Jeremy Logan series—have taken him everywhere from the frozen wastes of Alaska to an archaeological dig in a Sudanese swamp, Chrysalis takes place in his native Connecticut, nevertheless an environment as fascinating and foreign as any he’s encountered to date.
The titular Chrysalis is a visionary mega-corporation with its fingers in all sorts of pies, including blockbuster movies and books, pharmacology, agribusiness, medical implants, and beyond. However, its flagship product is a virtual reality/augmented reality system called Venture. The sleek, increasingly ubiquitous devices are like Google Glass on steroids, tapping into a host of personal data and state-of-the-art tech to deliver a unique experience—complete integration with users’ daily lives, including streamlined enhancement of product lines across Chrysalis’s other divisions. But on the cusp of the rollout of Phase Two, a revolutionary new development that will change e-commerce and, eventually, everything from vacations to education, tragedy strikes. A Chrysalis board member dies under mysterious circumstances. And then another, and another, each death followed by a cryptic threatening message sent through the company’s own hypersecure servers.
Enter Jeremy Logan.
Logan is summoned to the company’s top-secret headquarters by Chrysalis’s general counsel, Claire Asperton, to help uncover the truth behind the deaths. But his investigation is stymied by a clear lack of commonality in how the different board members met their demise. The ticking clock of the impending Phase Two grows a sinister edge when the anonymous messenger threatens to murder a thousand Venture users on the first day of the rollout if his crippling demands are not met. With every inch of the case shrouded in technological wizardry and impossible logic, it will take every ounce of Logan’s substantial talents to outwit the culprit before disaster befalls both Chrysalis and its millions of users.
The settings of Logan’s adventures are often as fraught with mysteries and character as the story itself, and Chrysalis is no different in that respect. The Torus is an enclave unto itself, nestled deep in the wooded foothills of northeastern Connecticut, with on-site housing, entertainment, and state-of-the-art labs. Hundreds of the world’s top scientists call the complex home. And as the tale unfolds, incredible new areas and shocking secrets of the Chrysalis headquarters are revealed.
But with so many avant-garde technologies, potentially world-changing breakthroughs, and larger-than-life personalities cloistered in one place, secrecy, distrust, and other roadblocks to Logan’s investigation abound. There is no shortage of potential suspects, including the company’s reclusive chairman, the fiercely territorial head of security, and the aggressively eccentric genius behind the Venture tech itself, just to name a few. Of course, Child’s adroit writing will keep readers guessing until the very end.
Chrysalis has exactly what longtime fans of Child’s Jeremy Logan series will be expecting: masterful plotting, a deep and fascinating setting, a diverse cast of well-realized characters, and a gripping mystery, all tied together with smart and smooth-flowing prose. And if you haven’t yet discovered the heady wonders of a Logan mystery, this latest is a great place to start.
—Jeremy Burns
CITY ON FIRE
By Don Winslow
New York: William Morrow, 2022. $28.99
If there’s one word that can describe the work of Don Winslow, it might have to be “epic.” Not in the sweeping fantasy sense but rather in the grand Homeric tradition. From the drug wars along the U.S.-Mexico border to the morally gray underbelly of police work in New York City, Winslow has a knack for bringing a setting and its inhabitants to life like few others. While the Rhode Island setting of City on Fire may seem less engrossing than that of his previous works, the characters and world-building are among his best realized to date.
Protagonist Danny Ryan was once the heir apparent to an Irish mob contingent centered in Providence, but his father fell in with the bottle, and his dad’s partner, John Murphy, took over. Despite being a Ryan and married to Murphy’s daughter, Danny finds himself on the outside looking in when it comes to leadership in the gang. But all that changes when the détente between the Irish and the Italians is ruptured by Murphy’s impetuous younger son fondling Paulie Moretti’s new girlfriend at what was supposed to be a friendly annual get-together. That’s the first domino in a growing feud that devolves over the course of the next year into a full-blown war between the Irish and Italian crime families.
As the established order is violently upended time and again, an opportunity arises for Danny to take his father’s place and lead the Murphy-Ryan gang out of the deepening crisis. But with more to lose than ever, especially as a brand-new father, he soon realizes that he is playing a very dangerous game, one where lifelong relationships are strained to the breaking point, where duplicity is just part of doing business, and where each chess move could have unforeseen fatal consequences. Trapped between the FBI, the Italians, mob power brokers from Boston and New York, and untamed bravado from within his own ranks, Danny must escape an ever-tightening net seeking to snuff out everything he holds dear while trying to balance loyalties, treacheries, and the irrevocable changes foisted upon his world.
Winslow’s natural prose and organic characterization and dialogue are second to none, to the point where readers may find themselves forgetting they’re reading a novel. He makes everything and everyone feel real, without sacrificing of an inch of pacing. Despite most readers having little outwardly in common with someone like Danny, he is an exceptionally relatable protagonist, and it’s surprisingly easy to sympathize with his hopes, fears, and struggles. Other characters—an Italian hit man living a double life, a conniving FBI agent, and Danny’s largely supportive wife, Terri—are equally well realized, which serves to create a living, breathing world that will make readers feel as if these characters and their relationships have existed outside the yearlong window of this narrative.
Many readers were understandably shocked and disappointed when Winslow announced his retirement from writing earlier this year, but we can be thankful that what seems to be the final saga in his impressive oeuvre—this latest trilogy that has begun with City on Fire—looks to be one of his best yet. City on Fire is a phenomenal read from one of the most consistently compelling authors of our time. Highly recommended.
—Jeremy Burns
COPPERHEAD ROAD
By Brad Smith
Winnipeg: At Bay Press, 2022. $34.95
Capturing the atmosphere of the past is always challenging, but with Copperhead Road, Brad Smith creates a tale set in the Depression-era Appalachian South that seems both realistic and larger than life. In a time wracked by poverty, uncertainty, and the threat of losing everything, the Flagg family in rural North Carolina realizes that its molasses business isn’t going to make ends meet anymore. In a 1936-set take on Breaking Bad, the Flaggs, led by the family’s prodigal daughter Ava, decide to switch their focus from molasses to moonshine in order to stay financially afloat—and in the process, they find themselves drawn into society’s criminal underbelly.
Smith has paced and toned the book like a caper, with evocative settings, particularly the run-down countryside and the ominous urban areas. The pacing really starts to get satisfying when Smith introduces harder and more menacing criminals into the plot, and suddenly, the moonshining business morphs from a comparatively lighthearted though illegal scheme to a cog in the machinery of organized crime. The reactions of the Flaggs to the new family business are particularly memorable, particularly the journey of one member who wants no part of the criminality but who can’t say no to a cut of the profits.
If there is one shortcoming, it’s the fact that there isn’t enough depth to the decision-making involved in the ethical or unethical choices the characters end up making. What is the difference between (maybe) justifiably breaking poorly conceived laws in order to survive and committing acts of actual evil? Are individuals responsible for unintended consequences when they begin a shady venture? Does pragmatism take precedence over any kind of objective morality? Most of these issues are touched on, and, without question, too much emphasis on human darkness would have spoiled the book’s lighter atmosphere; however, in certain scenes, it would have served the narrative better to delve into the question of how much lawbreaking would cause the Flaggs to lose their souls.
All in all, Copperhead Road is an entertaining period piece that will leave readers hoping that the Flagg family’s misadventures will continue in future novels.
—Chris Chan
CURSE OF THE REAPER
By Brian McAuley
New York: Talos Press, 2022. $26.99
Debut novelist Brian McAuley may be a new name to book buyers, but he’s no stranger to storytelling. In addition to holding an MFA in Screenwriting from Columbia and teaching at Los Angeles’s Mount Saint Mary’s University, he is a WGA screenwriter whose production credits range from an episode of Fuller House to a handful of Lifetime movies. It’s all fodder for the creative mind, which has resulted in the publication of Curse of the Reaper.
Meet aging actor Howard Browning. Despite theatrical training and a deep commitment to craft, his claim to fame was embodying the Reaper—a celluloid boogeyman with a tragic past—in a series of ’80s horror franchise flicks (known collectively as Night of the Reaper). These days, he lives a quiet life with his cat, Stanley, occasionally appearing at conventions to sign autographs and pose for pictures with a dwindling fan base. Recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Howard decides to embrace retirement from public life—until a Reaper reboot is announced and he finds himself experiencing a primal urge to reprise the role one last time.
Enter bad boy Trevor Mane, who’s been tapped to pick up the Reaper’s rusty chain (clank!). A former sitcom child star (complete with the corny catchphrase “Indubitably!”), he’s since become a tabloid mainstay thanks to a drug problem that nearly got his girlfriend killed in a car crash. Now that he’s out of rehab, he needs the role to establish himself as a serious adult actor. But old habits die hard—and his self-destructive tendencies reemerge when the original Reaper starts campaigning for the part. What begins as a bit of good-natured competition between the two becomes deadly serious as fresh blood is spilled.
McAuley explores each character’s internal and external selves through the use of alternating viewpoints, which allows for the revelation of the persons behind the personas. The author also showcases his screenwriting chops by interspersing script excerpts from the earlier Reaper films throughout the narrative; in true meta fashion, the iconic killer becomes funnier and, arguably, less frightening—even as his methods grow increasingly macabre (think Freddy Krueger as the Nightmare on Elm Street series (d)evolved). But when the Reaper’s bloodlust begins to leap off the page/screen and into the real world, Howard and Trevor realize the only options are to contain it or be consumed by it; indeed, they’ve both descended into darkness and depravity from which there may be no return.
On its surface, Curse of the Reaper is a clever, comical, creepy ode to the sanctity of slasher movies and the people who make them. But, as with the best genre offerings, McAuley dares to cut deeper than skin-level superficiality, revealing the insidious nature of dementia, mental illness, and addiction, which prey on weaknesses and vulnerabilities and can make monsters out of mortal men and women. Perhaps only by confronting these truths can we understand, and ultimately unlock, the power of our collective humanity. The alternative is that we simply fade to black.
—John B. Valeri
A DEADLY COVENANT
By Michael Stanley
New York: White Sun Books, 2022. $16.99
A Deadly Covenant is the eighth book in Michael Stanley’s Detective Kubu mystery series. It is a prequel that takes us back to the early days of David “Kubu” Bengu’s career. The series is set in Botswana and gives a convincing depiction of the complexities of an African country, the conflicts between rural and urban communities, the hostility between cultural and racial groups, the struggles between poverty and wealth. The book is an exploration of prejudice, protest, corruption, and secrets, but it’s written with a light hand and with well-depicted and believable characters.
The novel opens with the discovery of a human skeleton by a backhoe driver. Further investigation reveals a mass grave of old bones. Kubu is sent from Gaborone to investigate. Since this is early in Kubu’s career, it’s the first time in his professional life that he is facing the challenges of village politics—a hostile chief who does not want the investigation carried out; religious beliefs about Mami Wata, the water spirit some villagers believe is angry about the water being stolen; and the long-ago and still-unsolved disappearance of an old man’s son. Most locals are reluctant to talk to Kubu, and he soon discovers this is a village full of secrets and conflicts.
Then there is a murder, and then there’s a second one. Kubu knows he is facing a dangerous killer. The local police officer, Balopi, arrests Selelo, a Bushman who has recently arrived in the area. The Bushmen are a despised people against whom there is a great deal of prejudice. Selelo’s guilt will be a neat solution that will create no waves and close the matter down.
But Kubu is not convinced. He is determined to test what evidence there is against Selelo—whom he believes to be innocent—and to find the real killer. And so begins a complex and dangerous investigation.
Stanley presents a complex narrative, full of twists, turns, and misdirection. It is a dark story of conspiracy, corruption, and revenge, but Stanley leavens this with humor and with characters who convince and engage. Kubu is full of the uncertainties of inexperience but confident of his principles, worried about his private life and fearing that his long absence from Gaborone will destroy his newly developing relationship with a young woman, Joy. He is intelligent, and his deductive brain leads him through the investigation to the solution, but he needs the guidance and support of his mentor, Mabaku. The solution is satisfying—surprising but arising logically from the narrative that Stanley has given us.
A Deadly Covenant is a real page-turner, perfect for those who like their mysteries complex and want something a little different. Stanley brings to life a setting that will be unfamiliar to many readers, with the welcome absence of the stereotypes that can plague this genre. The Detective Kubu series is an underrecognized addition to the list of must-reads in the world of mystery fiction. Bring on the next one!
—Danuta Reah
THE INK BLACK HEART
By Robert Galbraith
City: Mulholland Books, 2022. $32.00
The Ink Black Heart is the sixth novel in Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike series featuring private detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott. It’s no secret that “Robert Galbraith” is a nom de plume used by the Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling, and the series rose from middling sales to bestseller success once that information came out.
The Ink Black Heart draws partly on Rowling’s own experiences of being a victim of online trolling. A young writer, Edie Ledwell, comes to Strike’s agency and asks Robin for help in identifying an online troll known as Anomie, who has been viciously attacking Edie’s work, character, and life. Edie is one of the creators and writers of The Ink Black Heart, a YouTube cartoon series that has gained a cult following. It is set in Highgate Cemetery in London and revolves around the dead who inhabit the graveyard, including the sinister Lord Drek, the beautiful ghost Paperwhite, and the disembodied heart, Harty.
Robin is intrigued but can’t help her. A few days later, Edie and her series co-creator Josh Blay are found stabbed in Highgate Cemetery. Edie dies, and Josh suffers life-changing injuries. Edie’s family approaches Cormoran and Robin for help, and this time they take on the investigation.
It transpires that Anomie has developed a game based on The Ink Black Heart series, called Drek’s Game (named after Lord Drek). The game features an online forum where fans meet online and discuss the series and where different characters from the series involve themselves in various private chats. And through it all, Anomie imbues the game with his or her sinister presence and heavily influences and dominates the players and the moderators. The timelines involved in these chats and the chats themselves are important to the plot, but Kindle readers beware: the e-book makes these very difficult to read.
Part of Robin’s job is to infiltrate this online world. In the real world, the duo’s investigation moves around different areas of Edie’s life, including family, work, colleagues, friends, and enemies. This creates a complex narrative, made more so by the author’s inclusion of the other cases the agency is dealing with. Along with this is Cormoran’s love life and the will-they-won’t-they relationship between Cormoran and Robin.
Whether writing as J. K. Rowling or as Robert Galbraith, Rowling’s great skill as a writer is her ability to tell a story. The narrative is complex with Anomie’s machinations, the tragedy of the talented Edie’s death, the life-changing effects on Blay, the moves and links between the real world and the online world, and the extent to which these can no longer be seen, but Galbraith guides readers through this massively complex world in a way that keeps them engaged.
It’s also clear that the author is airing personal issues. Galbraith/Rowling deftly explores the sheer venom of online trolling, the effects on the victim, the envy that success produces, and the malice that can arise. There are no straw dogs here—the situation Galbraith describes is very real, and the power the anonymity of the internet confers can be very frightening.
Other aspects of the book are less successful, however. For people who like their narratives long and with a tendency to wander down every possible pathway—a bit in the manner of a Spenserian romance, fans of The Faerie Queene take note—this is fine. But others may feel that, like the later Harry Potter books, The Ink Black Heart would benefit from some editing. The book is very long—more than one thousand pages. There are places where the narrative is slow and baggy and needs tightening up.
Another problem is the ongoing Cormoran-Robin romance or lack of it. Will-they-won’t-they relationships in series very quickly paint the writer into a corner for how to resolve them, and they can become tedious. Finding reasons to keep the characters apart becomes more of a struggle and less and less convincing. Relationships were not Rowling’s strength in the Harry Potter series, and the same problem exists between Cormoran and Robin. We are told they are drawn to each other, but there is no real fire there. Rowling has also made the mistake of presenting Cormoran as a sexually magnetic man whom women find irresistible, yet he drinks too much beer, smokes heavily, never gets enough sleep, and lives on junk food.
Despite these caveats, The Ink Black Heart is a gripping narrative, convincing and well told. It is possibly the best so far in this series, a real page-turner with a lot of pages to turn! Recommended.
—Danuta Reah
JUNK SCIENCE AND THE AMERICAN CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM
By M. Chris Fabricant
New York: Akashic Books, 2022. $29.95
Sir Bernard Spilsbury was arguably the first celebrity pathologist, a man whose testimony in early-twentieth-century British courts of law was long considered the final word in forensic science. With his commanding and convincing manner, he persuaded many juries to convict based on evidence he had analyzed, but decades later, some researchers have concluded that many of Spilsbury’s conclusions were scientifically unsound. One condemned man went to the gallows protesting his innocence, declaring, “I am a martyr to Spilsburyism.” In Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System, M. Chris Fabricant argues that Spilsburyism (whether or not that term is actually fair to the late doctor) is alive and well and still leading to the convictions of many innocent people.
On television shows such as CSI, viewers are informed that “the science doesn’t lie.” Perhaps solid science is reliable, but pseudoscience presents inherent mistruths. Fabricant, director of strategic litigation for the Innocence Project, draws on his personal experience as a defense attorney to illustrate how the titular junk science has corrupted courtrooms and produced faulty verdicts. The two fields of forensic investigation that he claims are the most problematic are arson investigation and bite-mark analysis. Fabricant argues that many arson investigators are trained (often without extended education) to identify certain points as proof of arson without taking innocent possibilities into consideration. He profiles prominent cases, including one in which a genuine expert was able to debunk many false assumptions about the forensic evidence in a house fire, leading to the vindication of an innocent man. Bite-mark evidence, once considered a reliable gauge of the wounds left by teeth, has in recent years been dismissed as terribly flawed, and the confident declarations by “expert” witnesses who proclaim that certain bite marks must have come from a particular defendant have been utterly discredited, leading to wrongly convicted people being set free, though not until after they’ve lost lengthy stretches of their lives.
While the book is highly informative and otherwise well written, it could have been better structured. Some of the sagas of wrongly convicted people are spread out throughout the book, and the narrative might have been easier to follow if an entire story was told in a single chapter rather than in a few pages over the course of four or five chapters, all with other chapters separating them. Additionally, some deeper analysis of what qualifies as good science would really help readers understand the full scope of what is being presented. The book avoids technical jargon, but deeper background information on several disciplines would prove particularly helpful to readers trying to understand how some professed forensic experts went so very wrong.
Fabricant’s portrait of American criminal justice might strike some as overly negative, but he makes a number of strong points, and anyone who reads this book will conclude that certain changes need to be made.
—Chris Chan
MUST READ WELL
By Ellen Pall
Baltimore: Bancroft Press, 2022. $27.95
Must Read Well is an unusually original and deeply engaging mystery. Liz Miller is a postgraduate student struggling to complete her doctorate. She has been told her dissertation lacks depth, and she needs more material to complete it. In order to do this, she needs to interview feminist and reclusive author Anne Taussig Weil. Early in her career, Weil wrote one massively successful novel, The Vengeance of Catherine Clark, followed by failure and finally rejection of her further work. She has refused to talk to Liz, despite Liz’s several requests.
Liz’s personal life is in chaos as well. Her boyfriend has left her, and she is effectively homeless, reduced to sleeping on her best friend’s couch. Then, in a strange coincidence, she sees an ad offering accommodation to someone who will read aloud to the owner of the apartment. The only stipulation is that the person who takes up the role must read well.
Liz’s previous contacts with and knowledge of Weil make her realize that the person offering this accommodation is the reclusive writer herself. Concealing her identity, she applies for and gets the post. She then embarks on a life of parasitic deception, as she begins to steal information from Weil inside an apartment filled with memories of the past and with secrets Weil has kept hidden all her life.
Must Read Well is a classic slow burner in which author Ellen Pall builds up a picture of a growing, if one-sided, friendship. Pall deftly presents the parallel narratives: the modern-day story of Liz’s life in the apartment, her work, and her ambitions, alongside the story told in Weil’s diaries, which Liz must read out loud to her sight-impaired employer. The claustrophobic setting of the apartment provides the perfect backdrop for the relationship we see unfolding between the two women in their conversations.
Pall ratchets up the tension until the book’s climax in the last two chapters. In less expert hands, this could have turned into an information dump. Instead, Pall turns the narrative on its head as we discover that much of what we thought we knew was upside down. By the end of the book, readers will know the full story of Weil’s life and have a much greater insight into the consequences of Liz’s long deception. Yet this isn’t the popular, and often unnecessary, twist that so many authors seem to find necessary these days but instead a highly interesting retelling of a narrative with key details added later in a way that leads to an unexpected but very satisfying conclusion.
Beautifully written, Must Read Well is a book that draws the reader into its world and becomes more and more absorbing as the strange relationship between the women, the place, and the events of the past play out.
Highly recommended.
—Danuta Reah
THE TWIST OF A KNIFE
By Anthony Horowitz
New York: Harper, 2022. $29.99
Internationally bestselling author Anthony Horowitz has continued to proliferate the market with consistently excellent content across a variety of formats. In addition to blockbuster adult novels such as Magpie Murders (2017) and Moonflower Murders (2020), the Alex Rider spy series for young adults, and stories in the iconic Sherlock Holmes and James Bond canons, he is responsible for creating and/or writing some of UK television’s biggest hits: Midsomer Murders and Foyle’s War. Horowitz has also written a (somewhat) fictionalized version of himself as a Watson-like scribe working for disgraced detective Daniel Hawthorne in a series whose fourth entry, The Twist of a Knife, has just appeared.
The story’s beginning would seem to be an ending of sorts, too. With their publishing contract complete, Horowitz, the character in the book—who feels his creativity has been stifled (and his sanity tested) by the secretive, temperamental Hawthorne—professes to be done with their collaboration. Rather than coauthoring books based on Hawthorne’s investigative exploits, his sights are now firmly set on solo endeavors. The first of these is a new stage play, Mindgame (think Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap or Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth). But the promise of this venture comes to an abrupt halt when a notoriously ruthless theater critic, Harriet Throsby, publicly pans the production—and is then found stabbed to death the morning after the premiere.
The timing is suspicious, sure, but the murder weapon (a dagger much like the one gifted to the playwright) and some suggestive CCTV footage are the most damaging to the fictional Horowitz. Soon an old foe, DI Cara Grunshaw, arrives at his doorstep with a chip on her shoulder and a grudge in her heart, and Horowitz is taken into police custody. With no reason to believe the authorities will pursue alternative leads or persons of interest, Horowitz is forced to call on Hawthorne. Of course, there’s no guarantee that his former partner will pick up the phone, let alone do anything to intervene or advocate on his behalf. (Spoiler alert: he will, and he does.)
As with the previous books, Horowitz—or Tony, as Hawthorne insists on calling him—narrates the story in the first-person past tense. While this has always added an element of intimacy to the proceedings, it’s particularly powerful here given the circumstances, which render the Horowitz character a bit desperate and (more) off balance. Further, the interplay between him and Hawthorne brings levity while their deep dive into Throsby—who had earlier been a reporter and a true crime writer—unearths the hatred and hostility others held toward her. Consequently, the duo finds potential suspects and motivations that go beyond Horowitz (and his Mindgame family)—but will any of it lead to exculpatory evidence? All the while, Grunshaw is standing by, just waiting for the chance to give a turn of the (prison cell) key.
With The Twist of a Knife, the “real” Horowitz ensures that the series remains sprightly as it progresses. The personal nature of the case, including the fact that his namesake character’s life and livelihood are on the line, guarantees the readers’ investment while he continues to tantalize by slowly revealing layers of Hawthorne’s backstory, like clues to an unsolved crime. Fittingly, it’s the people who exist within these pages that continue to demand our attention and loyalty, no matter how ingenious the plots are.
—John B. Valeri
WITH A MIND TO KILL
By Anthony Horowitz
New York: Harper, 2022. $26.99
Over the past seven decades or so, James Bond has become a pop-culture icon like few others. The seminal superspy may be best known for his film appearances, but the literary roots of Ian Fleming’s creation have continued alongside the Hollywood blockbusters, with writers such as John Gardner, Raymond Benson, and Jeffery Deaver penning unique Bond adventures throughout the years. Anthony Horowitz is the latest author to captain the ship that Fleming built, and in his third Bond book, With a Mind to Kill, he delivers a tense and captivating thriller that easily stands toe-to-toe with the best of Bond’s original missions.
Picking up after the events of Fleming’s final 007 book, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), Horowitz has Bond tasked with going undercover with a secret Soviet group, Stalnaya Ruka, which rose from the ashes of the classic Bond villain collective SMERSH. Among its leadership is Colonel Boris, who had brainwashed Bond into attempting to assassinate M a few months before. Now, with a major attack in the works that could upend the balance of power, a newly deprogrammed Bond must convince his former turncoat spymasters that he successfully assassinated M and is loyal to the Soviet cause. But will his fractured mind be strong enough to withstand further mind-melting interrogation and fool the malevolent masters of mental manipulation, or will he succumb to their traps and become a pawn in a conspiracy to topple the world order?
Horowitz not only writes mainstay series characters like Bond and Q in stellar Fleming-like fashion, but he also makes sure that the new characters like Colonel Boris and Lieutenant General Irma Kirilenko are standouts as villains. The story’s subversion of a typical “Bond girl” subplot is engaging, as is the plumbing of Bond’s very raw and flawed psyche.
From the oppressive gray settings of Soviet-era Moscow and East Berlin to the duplicitous Soviet generals playing power games against Bond and each other, the tale positively oozes Cold War intrigue. The ever-present threat of being a spy deep in enemy territory, while Bond can’t even trust his own mind, makes even the quiet moments thrum with tension, keeping the book moving at a brisk pace. And unlike in Fleming’s spacefaring Moonraker (1955) or the almost cartoonish grandiosity of Goldfinger (1959), the villains and their nefarious plot are much more grounded and believable—no secret volcano lairs or outlandish spy gadgets here—which makes the book much more interesting. The mind-control and deep-cover double-agent plot provides plenty of dynamic and multilayered conflicts while also being more faithful to the real history and conspiracies of the time period.
With snappy prose that reads like Fleming’s and the grounded but thrilling Cold War setting, Horowitz’s latest offering is a Bond book that would fit perfectly with the original run. While readers expecting more of the high-octane action set pieces and over-the-top plots that made “Bond villain” a derogatory trope for many critics may be disappointed, those looking for a vividly realized spycraft thriller with a creative yet believable spin on the classic formula will thoroughly enjoy With a Mind to Kill.
—Jeremy Burns
THE KINGDOMS OF SAVANNAH
By George Dawes Green
New York: Celadon, 2022. $27.99
Savannah is a city with a reputation for beauty and charm. Tourists flock to it for the period architecture, cobbled streets, green spaces, and vine flowers. However, the real Savannah has a dark, dark history, and like many modern cities, it carries this darkness into its present.
George Dawes Green’s meticulously researched novel, The Kingdoms of Savannah, explores the link between past and present and looks into the darkness that now lies at the heart of so much that is going on in contemporary Savannah: drug addiction, corruption, poverty, and homelessness.
The story opens with a murder, as a young homeless man, Luke Kitchens, is stabbed to death outside a bar while trying to protect his friend, Matilda Stone, who has been drugged by a stranger and subsequently abducted.
Meanwhile, a local landlord, the wealthy and much-disliked Archie Guzman, is arrested for Luke’s murder. According to the authorities, Guzman killed Luke by torching a derelict property where Luke, who sometimes worked for Guzman, was known to sleep. No mention is made of the stabbing.
Luke’s friend and sometime partner Jaq is determined to make Guzman pay for his crime, and without realizing that the two crimes are connected, she also sets out to find her missing friend, Matilda Stone. Unfortunately, Guzman has asked Jaq’s grandmother Morgana Musgrove—a prominent figure in local society and co-owner of a now-neglected detective agency—to establish his innocence and investigate on his behalf. Morgana, spurred by the massive sum of money Guzman has offered her, calls upon her estranged son Ransom, a homeless ex-con and alcoholic, for help. Ransom, who is still suffering the effects of his mother’s psychological abuse, tries to resist but is gradually persuaded to join her.
The only clue Ransom and Morgana have to go on is the secret message Archie manages to give them in the course of their first meeting in jail, the words “Stone Kings treasure keep safe and give my love.”
Green tells his story through the eyes of his characters: Jaq; Ransom; Nick Galatas, the cop who befriends Jaq and tries to persuade her to protect herself and drop the quest to find her friend; Morgana’s daughters, Willou and Bebe; and Matilda, who is imprisoned somewhere underground. He uses their voices to recreate the “voice” of Savannah, not with overuse of eye dialect, which can be distracting, but with the occasional representation of the accent and, more than anything, a prose style that catches the rhythm of the spoken words and takes the reader into the heart of this complex world. These shifts of perspective present the tale in disparate pieces that gradually come together to create a whole story of greed, corruption, and betrayal. This is a character-driven novel with characters who are engaging from the start, like Jaq, the young idealist, but also characters who initially are unsympathetic but come to engage. Morgana, for example, is a monster, but she’s a monster who becomes understandable and, to a certain extent, forgivable; her daughter Willou is also an apparently powerful and intimidating woman whose insecurities become apparent as the narrative develops.
Green writes knowledgeably about Savannah, both its history and its current dilemmas, but never in a didactic way. He weaves this complex society and history into a narrative around which people must decide what their values are, where they stand in relation to history and the truth, and how far they will go to defend these. The people he writes about live in mansions or in the homeless encampments that ring the city and are regularly trashed by the police. The homeless, excluded from mainstream society by poverty, ill health, and addiction end up living in and creating their own societies. The history of the city acts as a constant backdrop—the slave sale known as the Weeping Time, carried out at the racetrack; the largely unknown history of the Black soldiers who fought on the side of the king of England in the Revolutionary War and refused afterward to return to slavery, living in a secret community on an offshore island; the bloody assault on that same island; the hanging of indentured servant Alice Riley.
Often such a narrative would struggle against its own complexity, but Green handles his story deftly, leading his readers in via the same route the protagonists take, exploring the forces that drive this society and how hard it is to resist them. The end result is a compelling mystery, with moments of humor and moments of real tension and suspense.
This is a dark story because of the dark history that underlies it and the darkness of its contemporary setting, but it is also a story of redemption.
Highly recommended.
—Danuta Reah
LISTEN TO ME
By Tess Gerritsen
New York: Ballantine, 2022. $28.00
Amid the Covid pandemic and civil unrest, internationally bestselling author (and physician) Tess Gerritsen found herself seeking solace. Fortunately, that craving for comfort and consistency led to the return of Boston’s beloved crime-fighting duo—detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles—in Listen to Me, the thirteenth entry in the venerable Rizzoli and Isles series (which also inspired a hit TV series of the same name). Gerritsen has also written medical thrillers, historical fiction, and romantic suspense. Her books have sold more than 40 million copies in as many countries around the globe.
Another day, another death. As Listen to Me opens, Jane and Maura are on the scene of a homicide. Recent widow and ICU nurse Sofia Suarez has been brutally bludgeoned in her own home, spatters of blood attesting to the violence of her last moments. It seems like a random attack, but Jane knows better than to suppress her instincts—especially when the evidence includes a newly acquired laptop, a burner cell phone, and a series of calls and communications that indicate . . . something. Whatever Sofia was involved in, did it lead to her death? Jane doesn’t yet know, but she’s determined to find out.
Meanwhile, Jane’s mom, Angela—a POV character for the first time—can’t help noticing that her quiet suburban street has gone a bit seedy. With her boyfriend traveling, there’s little to distract her from flirtatious neighbors, marital discord, and a runaway teen. Throw in standoffish newcomers and a mysterious white van, and she just knows that something sinister is afoot.
Told from multiple points of view—including a hit-and-run victim whose story somehow aligns with the others—the narrative connects past and present events with precision. Covid provides a subtle if significant subtext (for instance, Jane no longer shakes hands), as does a communal mistrust of law enforcement. But there are also moments of unexpected lightness amid the lingering grief of a traumatized nation. It’s there in Jane’s good-natured sarcasm, Maura’s singular steadfastness, Angela’s motherly concern. Consequently, Gerritsen has delivered to readers some of the comfort she herself sought when she started writing this book.
Listen to Me is not just a title, it’s a plea, a rallying cry, a warning. As a woman—and a woman of both maturity and minority—Gerritsen knows the importance of informed thinking and intuition. They save lives. Or at least they can. This is a welcome return for Rizzoli and Isles, whose loyalty to each other and to the cause of justice serves as a balm in troubling times. Gerritsen never disappoints—and once again, she shows that the best fiction is grounded in fact.
—John B. Valeri
THE MIDNIGHT RIDE
By Ben Mezrich
New York: Grand Central, 2022. $29.00
Fiction lovers may not be familiar with the name Ben Mezrich, but they’re likely familiar with his work. In recent years, Mezrich has been one of the biggest names in narrative nonfiction. His Bringing Down the House (2002) was made into the 2008 movie 21, and The Accidental Billionaires (2009) was the basis for the Oscar-winning The Social Network in 2010. But while Mezrich got his publishing start with a handful of standalone thrillers in the late ’90s, his adult-fiction output since has been limited to a 2014 novel and a novella the following year. Does he still have the chops to make his latest fictional foray memorable? Short answer: yes. But not for all the reasons you might think.
In a nutshell, The Midnight Ride concocts a fascinating connection between the infamous 1990 Isabella Gardner Museum art heist in Boston—the most lucrative unsolved art theft in modern history—and a world-changing secret hidden by Paul Revere. While the cover copy alludes to “the most fascinating secret in American history,” readers expecting a lost founding document or a secret Constitution will be pleasantly surprised by the unique direction this thrill ride takes them in.
The trio of protagonists are an unlikely bunch. Card counter and MIT grad student Hailey Gordon has developed a unique set of skills to fund her academic dreams in advanced mathematics, but a secret from her past could unravel everything she has worked so hard to achieve. Nick Patterson is an ex-con, fresh out of prison for a robbery gone wrong years ago. Looking for a new start, he inherits from his murdered cellmate a surefire job with enough of a payoff to help him get on his feet for good—only to find his contact dead and strapped to a chair in a casino hotel room, fingernails pulled out, with a scared-looking Hailey standing over the body. Adrian Jensen, a Tufts professor and one of Boston’s foremost experts on Paul Revere, is shocked when his professional rival—attention-seeking Harvard professor Charles Walker—is found dead on the cusp of publishing a career-making paper. Adrian is even more shocked when he discovers that Walker, in an attempt to lord the magnitude of his find over his nemesis, sent him a copy of his unpublished paper just before his untimely death, the startling conclusions of which send the skeptical scholar on a collision course with Hailey and Nick, with local and federal law enforcement, and with a shadowy organization that has potential ties to the Boston Mafia.
The quest takes readers through some of historic Boston’s highlights: the Bunker Hill Monument, the tunnels beneath MIT, the gilded dome of the Massachusetts State House, and the Revolutionary-era warship USS Constitution. It’s an exciting and authentic-feeling tour, penned by a local author who clearly knows and appreciates the intricate details of his hometown.
It’s worth noting The Midnight Ride’s unusual pedigree. The book has its origins in a serial novella by Mezrich published in the Boston Globe over fifteen days during the height of Covid-related lockdowns in 2020. Mezrich subsequently expanded that novella, originally titled The Mechanic, into the full novel The Midnight Ride. And while this reviewer has not read the original version to compare and contrast, it seems those serialized origins still shine through, for good and for ill.
On the plus side, the story is very briskly paced. At roughly 80,000 words and featuring regular cross-cutting across multiple points of view and locales, the plot starts off fast and rarely lets up. Books of this ilk are often prone to info dumps educating readers about the deep historical mysteries at their core, but Mezrich handles these adroitly, keeping the suspense going even during longer scenes of historical discovery and revelation. Dialogue is snappy and often witty, and the cat-and-mouse push and pull between the protagonists, the secret truth they seek, the cops, and the Family’s assassins keep things moving throughout.
Unfortunately, some of the characterization seems to suffer for the limited time and space available for a daily serialized story. Hailey is an excellent and well-rounded protagonist, with a deep and compelling backstory that explains both her drive and her fears, endearing her to readers. Adrian is also an intriguing character, with his bold cyclist fashion choices, pedantic attitude, and negligible people skills, but he doesn’t reach the cusp of a breakthrough for his character arc until the end of the novel. Nick, too, seems somewhat like a second fiddle to Hailey’s brilliant mind and helpful skill set. The FBI art crimes investigator is fairly dynamic, though his foil, a bull-headed Boston PD homicide detective, comes off as a bit one-note. But the worst offenders are the main antagonists—two professionals contracted by the ultra-mysterious Family, Patricia and Curt, whose skills are impressive but whose motivations and backstory are negligible. Patricia is said to be a former sparrow trained at a Soviet school before the fall of the USSR (à la Red Sparrow), but all the potentially fascinating backstories, character motivations, and personal demons that could organically grow from that origin point are never touched upon. Curt has even less of a personality beyond his mission, and the mysterious Mr. Arthur and the Family he helms are completely undercooked. This lack of character development for the antagonists could be because the original material was a serialized novella and the author needed to keep the daily focus on the protagonists and their quest.
The choice of ending is a double-edged sword. While many series authors leave some narrative threads unresolved to tantalize readers until their next installment, The Midnight Ride ends just as things are gearing up for the next phase of the characters’ still-unresolved main quest. And while Mezrich offers clear clues about which founding father and Revolutionary-era city will be highlighted in the sequel, the ending may leave some readers feeling unfulfilled; however, it will likely leave many more chomping at the bit for the next installment in what is slated to be a trilogy.
The Midnight Ride offers plenty of action and unexpected surprises, using an established treasure-hunt formula to strong effect. Though the development of most characters is somewhat lacking in this first entry, Hailey is a great and well-developed lead, and the pieces are there for the other characters to continue their arcs to satisfying conclusions in future books. In short, if you like Dan Brown, Steve Berry, James Rollins, and their subgenre, The Midnight Ride is an invigorating and thought-provoking romp through one of America’s most historically significant cities. Just bear in mind going in that this ride is only part of the journey. Here’s hoping the rest of the trilogy comes out soon!
—Jeremy Burns
NONNA MARIA AND
THE CASE OF THE MISSING BRIDE
By Lorenzo Carcaterra
New York: Bantam, 2022. $27.00
Lorenzo Carcaterra is a formidable wordsmith. A former newspaper and magazine reporter, he’s also been a screenwriter—his TV credits include Law & Order—and he has penned more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction. His writing credits include the #1 New York Times bestseller Sleepers (1995), which sold more than a million copies and was adapted into a major motion picture in 1996. Carcaterra’s 2021 memoir, Three Dreamers, featured remembrances of his beloved grandmother—a fictionalized version of whom serves as the heroine of his new mystery, Nonna Maria and the Case of the Missing Bride.
All her life, widow Nonna Maria—mother of seven, grandmother of many more—has lived on Ischia, a volcanic island off the coast of Naples. She has remained steadfast in her loyalty to family, friends, and community—even as her homeland has been fundamentally changed by a boom in tourism. Her kitchen, where she pours espresso and serves pasta, is a place of refuge, where people young and old come with their questions and concerns; many of these inquiries could be directed to the local authorities, the carabinieri, but Nonna Maria inspires a special kind of trust that outsiders don’t.
It’s in this spirit that she’s approached by Anna—a young bride-to-be who fears that she was (chemically) duped into an engagement with a man she hardly knows, let alone loves. It’s a scheme that Nonna Maria is all too familiar with, and so she ushers the girl into hiding until she can discern the truth of the matter. Meanwhile, Nonna Maria’s dear friend Pasquale—a lifelong seaman—has been found dead in the gulf’s waters, his demise thought to be the result of an inebriated fall from his tour boat. But Nonna Maria knows better and suddenly finds herself involved in two cases that threaten to bring the wrong kinds of company to her door.
Whatever investigative limitations Nonna Maria faces due to age or lack of authority are largely negated by the loyalty of others, many of whom are beholden to her or simply wish to help (often in exchange for food and drink). The narrative is told in the third person and alternates between our protagonist and more peripheral figures. Not only does this serve to reveal the personalities at play and legitimize certain plot points, but it also highlights the rich, reverent history of people and place, which are intimately intertwined. It’s a deceptively simple approach and one that gives the author a broad creative canvas to work with.
Carcaterra has done his grandmother proud with Nonna Maria and the Case of the Missing Bride, which is as charming as it is clever. The cases at hand satisfy, the secondary characters compel, and the setting pops, but Nonna Maria—who takes her medication with wine (when she takes it at all) and keeps a pocket full of candy—is the one who ensures that everything is grounded in heart, humor, and hope for the future. She’s got the wit, the wisdom, and the wisecracks to become a longtime series leading lady. More, please—and molto bene!
—John B. Valeri
OVERBOARD
By Sara Paretsky
New York: William Morrow, 2022. $28.99
A new Sara Paretsky novel is always a cause for celebration, and if it’s the latest in the V.I. Warshawski series, then raise an extra glass! Overboard, the twenty-first book in this long-running and successful series, once again explores the political and financial corruption that lies at the heart of Chicago politics.
While walking her dogs one day V.I. finds a young girl—unconscious and close to death—hidden among the rocks down by the lake. As V.I. tries to care for her while waiting for help, the girl recovers consciousness briefly and says the word Nagyi. And we’re off into the unpredictable, complex, always fascinating world of V.I. Warshawski. The police who arrive on the scene are hostile and aggressive, threatening V.I. and her dogs; sinister people begin poking around, expressing interest in the girl; and V.I. feels she needs to know who the girl is and why she had burn marks on her legs.
After being questioned in the hospital by a man who claims to be from the police, the girl runs away, even though she needs medical care. V.I. believes she is in danger, not just from her injuries but from the people who are pursuing her—a belief that is eventually confirmed.
As usual, V.I. is oversubscribed. She is trying to work on her own cases, she is trying to protect a Jewish temple from persistent vandalism, and she is in the process of taking up another case involving another frightened teenager who believes his father, Donny Litvak, an acquaintance from V.I.’s childhood in South Chicago, is in danger. Add a corrupt policeman, Scott Coney, to the mix, and we have all the ingredients for a vintage Warshawski novel. Arching over the whole scenario is the Covid pandemic, acting almost as a metaphor for modern American society and the creeping abuse of power by unelected forces, invisible but deadly in their effect. Throughout, V.I. and her circle remain an ever-beleaguered island of incorruptibility in the middle of the Chicago swamp.
Fans of the series will not be disappointed. Paretsky handles her complex narrative deftly, weaving together what might seem improbable threads in less-skilled hands into a tense and gripping thriller. The usual supporting cast is here, too: the dogs, Mitch and Peppy; V.I.’s elderly neighbor, Mr. Contreras (who no longer seems to have his pipe wrench but still wants to get into the action); the socially aware doctor Lotty Herschel; V.I.’s long-suffering lawyer, Freeman Carter; the journalist Murray Ryerson, redeemed from his sojourn in a Fox News-style organization and back to his old self from earlier books; the Streeter brothers, her cop acquaintances and sometime friends. There is also V.I.’s current lover, archaeologist Peter Sansen, who is overseas working on an archaeological dig. With so much going on, a lover offstage is probably better than one at the center of the action.
One of Paretsky’s strengths is the way she has developed her characters in real time, ensuring that the series stays fresh as all the characters evolve. V.I., who would in the early books shinny up lampposts and climb over high walls, is now restricted by the limitations of aging; Mr. Contreras is now an old man; the people V.I. got to know as young cops are now in senior positions, but their relationships with her remain ambiguous—after all, V.I. still bends the letter of the law in pursuit of justice and frequently falls foul of the corrupt but powerful forces in the city. And she remains the same in her passion for justice, her support for the underdog and her refusal to compromise. New characters move onto the stage, old ones reappear, and over it all is the complex, crumbling city of Chicago, at once beautiful and decaying.
Overboard is a gripping read in true Paretsky style, fast-moving with convincing characters and a satisfyingly complex plot. If you are planning a career in political corruption, keep away from Chicago—V.I. will get you.
Highly recommended.
—Danuta Reah
SINKHOLE
By Davida G. Breier
New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press, 2022. $18.95
Miami-born Davida G. Breier held an eclectic array of jobs before making her mark in zines and winning the 2011 Literary Death Match Baltimore 3.0. Breier has spent twenty years working in the publishing industry and is currently at Johns Hopkins University Press. Her novel debut is the South-centric Sinkhole, which chronicles the fallout of a toxic friendship turned deadly.
June 2001: “When I was eighteen, I killed my best friend.” This is the provocative (and deliberately perplexing) thought that pops into Michelle Miller’s mind as she gets behind the wheel of her car and begins the journey back to Lorida, Florida—a town she’s done her best to avoid since leaving fifteen years ago. But she can’t ignore the summons of her half brother, Michael, who calls to tell her their mother has been hospitalized and that she should “probably” come home. Of course, home is where the hurt is—and reentering that proverbial sinkhole will force her to confront the people and places she’s tried desperately to forget.
September 1984–September 1986: Michelle’s family, having recently suffered the loss of her father, lives in Paradise Acres—a small mobile-home community that does not reflect the grandeur of its name. Michelle is floundering until she is befriended by a privileged schoolmate named Sissy. The two are soon inseparable, which creates friction within their families. But Michelle is so enamored that she’s largely blind to her friend’s corrosive influence, even as Sissy’s cutting comments and passive-aggressiveness escalate. Enter Morrison, a sensitive, searching soul masquerading as the brooding bad boy. He and Michelle recognize themselves as kindred spirits, though Morrison is destined to become the third leg on a stool that threatens to collapse under the weight of their collective angst.
Adolescence and adulthood coalesce in dreaded anticipation as Michelle makes a fateful trip home, ruminating over old grievances along the way. The first two-thirds of the book is largely centered on her high school years (with short present-day chapters interspersed) and the gradual disintegration of relationships that occurred then—some fractured as much by misunderstandings as by deliberate manipulations. It’s a slow burn, but it comes to a breathtaking boil in the final act, when shocking truths (and mistruths) are exposed, revealing betrayals that cut deep. If there’s any chance for redemption, it comes with dredging up the past and burying it once and for all.
Breier’s Sinkhole is a captivating, claustrophobic debut in which no crime is as pervasive as a guilty conscience. The title reference is not only a natural phenomenon but (arguably) a metaphor for the quagmire of our formative years and, more expansively, the dark recesses of the human mind. We’ve all struggled with reconciling our self-image with what others see, or want to see, in us. While the humidity and oppression of the author’s story are distinctly Southern, the underlying idea that big (and often bad) things are bubbling just below the surface is universal.
—John B. Valeri
THE STONE ROSE
By Carol McGrath
London: Headline Accent, 2022. $15.99
A problem facing writers of historical fiction, especially those writing about major figures, is that the readers already know whodunit, whydunit, who married whom, and how they died, which tend to be major spoilers, despite the genre.
To deal with this problem, some authors choose to create a fictional character and set the narrative in an interesting time in history. Others concoct a fictional account of the life of a lesser-known historical figure. The third and harder option is to use a character whose place in history is documented and bring that character to life in a way that gives readers a realistic glimpse into a historical period.
This is what Carol McGrath does so well in her novels. In The Stone Rose, the final book in her She-Wolves Trilogy about the lives of medieval queens of England, she focuses on Isabella of France, sometimes described as the she-wolf of France, wife and later widow of Edward II, queen of England, and mother of Edward III. The history books depict her as greedy, traitorous, and scheming, a queen who raised an army against her husband, deposed him, and arranged his murder. However, a more detailed reading of the histories shows that this complex woman was, in fact, intelligent, politically savvy, and highly skilled in diplomacy, unlike her husband, whose self-indulgent and foolish behavior cost him his throne and, ultimately, his life. The Stone Rose explores Isabella’s life in the light of her actions as a young queen, at first supportive of her husband, later his bitter opponent.
The story starts with a prologue set in 1352. Agnes, the daughter of a stonemason who is trying to revive her now-dead father’s business, is awakened by a late-night visit from the dowager queen’s footman, who informs her that the queen would like her to work on the stone for the monarch’s planned tomb. Agnes travels through plague-ravaged England to carry out this commission, accompanied by Master Gregory, one of the queen’s pages, who begins to share with her details of the queen’s life. The rest of the book offers a fictionalized account of Isabella’s life and is divided into three sections—“The Young Queen,” “The Great Famine,” “The Great Rebellion”—and an epilogue.
The Stone Rose is a meticulously researched work of biographical fiction. Agnes, the stonemason’s daughter, is a real historical figure, and the events of Isabella’s life are all documented in a range of sources. McGrath supplies motivations, emotions, thoughts, and words that allow her characters to come alive on this distant stage. She doesn’t make the mistake that too many writers of historical fiction make in presenting their characters as twenty-first-century figures in a medieval landscape. Isabella, Edward II, and his favorites and possible lovers Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser are all depicted as people of their time. While McGrath’s wide knowledge of the period sometimes overtakes the narrative and the story moves a little slowly, overall it is an engaging and fascinating book that fleshes out the lives of people we know only from history books.
McGrath’s novel gives a more sympathetic account than most histories of Isabella—a woman forced to balance loyalty to her husband, the king, against her duty to her son and to the country that she made her own. Is McGrath’s interpretation of Isabella a true one? Who knows? What we do know is that the author’s interpretation is based on meticulous research, and she has offered it to us as a beautifully written and absorbing narrative that brings the world of these fourteenth-century women, a queen and a stonemason, to life.
—Danuta Reah
CATCH THE SPARROW
A Search for a Sister and the Truth of Her Murder
By Rachel Rear
New York: Bloomsbury, 2022. $27.00
Rachel Rear is a poet, playwright, and essayist whose works have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post, among other prestigious publications. A teacher and actor, she holds a BA (Rutgers), an MA (Columbia), and an MFA (New School). Rear makes her book debut with the nonfiction title Catch the Sparrow, a potent and personal blend of true crime and memoir.
On the evening of July 31, 1991, twenty-seven-year-old Stephanie Kupchynsky went missing from her home in Greece, New York (a suburb of Rochester), never to be seen alive again. It wouldn’t be until the spring of 1998, when two boys were playing near a small stream outside Holley, New York, that her skeletal remains were discovered, bones protruding from the water. Just how they’d come to be there and what had precipitated their disposal would remain a mystery for years to come—one that would torment family and friends, haunted by unanswered questions.
Enter Catch the Sparrow’s author, Rear, who was Kupchynsky’s stepsister (Rear’s mother had married Kupchynsky’s father). Rear never knew Kupchynsky in life but would come to know her intimately in death. Familiar with the tragic story of the young violin prodigy who escaped an abusive relationship by fleeing from Martha’s Vineyard and settling in Rochester, where she’d found both a new job and a new love, only to then disappear, Rear would make it her mission to find resolution. Beyond her deep sense of kinship with Kupchynsky, she wanted to unburden her stepfather, who lived with the grief and guilt of having survived a child and was also under an umbrella of suspicion.
Unfortunately, nothing about this case was straightforward, as Rear would soon find out. The investigation was fraught with false leads and red herrings, its few clues stymieing to authorities. Missing bedsheets. A discarded checkbook. An abandoned car in the parking lot of an airport. Then there’s the separate but related saga of the Rochester Police Department, rendered largely inefficient and ineffective by corruption and politics. But the tireless efforts of a heroic few would eventually result in the capture and confession of a killer. Kupchynsky’s story—and the author’s own, through its surprising parallels—is recounted in a candid, respectful manner that sheds light on what was and what could have been. It also honors those left behind, who keep Kupchynsky’s memory alive and have finally been freed from the shackles of their unknowing.
Catch the Sparrow is true crime, yes, but it’s not just that. It’s also an elegy for a life lost and a legacy lived. Rear isn’t interested in gratuitousness or sensationalism (though she doesn’t shy away from the realities of violence and its aftermath); rather, she’s interested in answers and in providing the closure that comes with knowing. The unintended yet poetic consequence is that she found herself, or at least a better understanding of herself, in the process. To read this book is to know, and celebrate, both women.
—John B. Valeri
THE FIELDS
By Erin Young
New York: Flatiron Books, 2022. $27.99
Erin Young is the semi-pseudonym of New York Times bestselling author Robyn Young, whose historical fiction has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide and includes the Brethren and Insurrection trilogies as well as two titles in the New World Rising series. Young makes her home in Brighton, England, where she writes full-time. The Fields is her debut suspense novel.
This book—the first in a planned series—introduces Sergeant Riley Fisher of Iowa’s Black Hawk County Sheriff’s Office. Recently promoted to head of investigations, she’s been subject to intense scrutiny, not only because she’s a woman but also because she’s the granddaughter of a former sheriff. With all eyes on her, she understands the importance of closing cases and inspiring confidence. But when the body of a childhood friend, Chloe Clark, is found dead in the cornfields, her skin marred by apparent bite wounds of unknown origin, the secrets of Riley’s past threaten to destroy both her reputation and her career.
The location of the body may be significant: Zephyr Farms, one of the last remaining businesses that’s managed to survive the insidious influence of Big Agriculture. Riley doesn’t like the potential implications, and her suspicions only grow when more bodies start turning up. Is there a serial killer on the loose? And what, if anything, do these killings have to do with the town’s corn production? The more she digs, the more Riley fears she (or others) may uncover dirt related to her own misdeeds—a feeling that’s compounded when the FBI is sent to assist with the investigation.
While her professional livelihood at stake, Riley is equally aggrieved on the home front. She lives with her older brother, Ethan, and his teenage daughter, Maddie, who is rebelling in the aftermath of her erratic parents’ split-up. However, not only is Ethan a liability, with his drinking and drugging, but he is also a constant reminder of shared secrets and shames that have festered between the siblings for decades. Other POVs are interspersed with Riley’s, allowing the author to contrast the intimacy of this personal drama with larger-scale politics and power plays, all of which are destined to coalesce in a fiery conclusion.
The Fields is an eerie, evocative thriller that melds fact with fiction to frighteningly realistic effect. Young may be new to the genre, but her storytelling prowess shines through, with a deft rendering of conflicted characters, an insular setting, and the juxtaposition of tradition and technology, all bolstered by science and circumstance. Not since Stephen King’s 1977 short story “Children of the Corn” (and the films based on it) have the fields been so deadly. This one just might scare the crop out of you.
—John B. Valeri
A FLICKER IN THE DARK
By Stacy Willingham
New York: Minotaur Books, 2022. $27.99
Stacy Willingham—a former copywriter and brand strategist with an undergraduate degree in magazine journalism and an MFA in writing—saw her foray into writing full-time pay off earlier this year, when her debut novel A Flicker in the Dark, became an instant New York Times bestseller.
Dr. Chloe Davis is a psychologist who helps others manage the kinds of anxieties and insecurities that have plagued her since her own childhood. While the formative years are often a breeding ground for disorders and dysfunctions, Chloe’s were more traumatic than most. When she was twelve, her father was arrested in connection with the disappearance and/or death of six teenage girls; he has remained incarcerated ever since, and Chloe lives with the knowledge that she discovered the evidence that helped put him away. Having fled small-town Louisiana, she has set up a practice in Baton Rouge. But ghosts aren’t stagnant, and Chloe’s return with a vengeance when young girls once again start to go missing in a manner that’s eerily reminiscent of twenty years ago.
At first, Chloe tries to tell herself that it’s coincidence. After all, tragedies happen every day. And she has other things to worry about. Like her upcoming wedding to Daniel Briggs, a successful pharmaceutical sales rep. Or quelling the pre-wedding reservations of her protective older brother, Cooper, who also bears the scars of their upbringing. But when authorities link the missing girls to Chloe and a reporter from the New York Times comes calling, she can’t deny the connection—no matter how much self-medicating she does. Is this present-day spree the work of a copycat? Or an accessory to the original crimes? It’s enough to make Chloe wonder who’s safe . . . and who’s suspect.
The narrative is limited to Chloe’s point of view, which is an effective, emotionally evocative lens. In addition to creating a rapport with the reader, it begets subtle questions of transparency and trust. What’s real? What isn’t? And what’s simply (or not so simply) a matter of interpretation? When perspective is restricted to one character, such reservations abound, whether warranted or not, and particularly within the machinations of a mystery. Beyond establishing credible red herrings, the author does a masterful job of allowing Chloe to vacillate between real-time action/thought and reminiscence, which not only reveals critical backstory but creates a near-hypnotic state in which past and present coalesce.
A Flicker in the Dark is a debut of distinction. Willingham has a unique voice that is immediately arresting and authoritative. This, coupled with richly drawn characters and intricate plotting, makes a memorable impression. While some readers may see the final twist coming, others will be completely blindsided. The beauty of such a book is that it doesn’t matter. Neither surprise nor suspicion should diminish the satisfaction of a story well told.
—John B. Valeri
GOOD NIGHT, FOREVER
By Jeffrey Fleishman
Ashland, OR: Blackstone, 2022. $27.99
Good Night, Forever is the third book in Jeffrey Fleishman’s Sam Carver series. LA detective Carver, a damaged, solitary man, is faced with the murder of his lover, Lily Hernandez, when he returns to her home and finds the police there because Lily has been shot and killed. On the mirror are the words Hi, Sam. I’m back. Carver recognizes the calling card. He knows it belongs to Dylan Cross, the serial killer who escaped him and who has been stalking him for some time. But this is not Carver’s case, and when he offers his opinion to Alicia Bryant, the detective charged with leading the investigation, she is not convinced.
Carver, despite instructions to the contrary from his boss, sets out to track down Cross. Meanwhile, he is also working on a separate investigation: the arson murders of homeless men and women in the tent city that has grown up in the middle of one of the richest cities in the world. It is inhabited not only by the mentally ill and the opiate-addicted but more and more by poor families who have not been able to survive the effects of financial squeezes.
The case leads Carver to sinister sites on the Dark Web. Here he finds online communities inhabited by neo-Nazi and far-right groups, whose members do not see the homeless as human and deserving of rights, and to an online hate poster—PureLand—who promotes the arson attacks and describes the homeless as vermin who must be destroyed.
Fleishman deftly handles the threads of the separate investigations, moving Carver between his search for Cross—and his attempts to convince Bryant that Cross is Lily’s killer—and the search for the perpetrators of the attacks on the homeless. The action is fast-paced, and Fleishman skillfully moves the narrative among all the different scenes—from the streets of LA, with the tent city’s beleaguered inhabitants, the white supremacist group encouraging attacks, and the work of Dr. Michael Ruiz as he attempts to help the homeless, to Oregon and the farm of the Crenshaw brothers, whose paramilitary organization Carver suspects may be behind the attacks.
The book is pure noir, and Carver is the epitome of the noir detective: maverick, solitary, troubled. The action slows down or comes to a complete stop from time to time for descriptions of the dark, rainy landscapes the characters are given to staring out at while they exchange gnomic utterances. If these sound like clichés of the genre, they are, but there’s a reason things become clichés in mystery fiction: readers enjoy them. Fleishman knows how to use them to good effect, and despite the noirish bent, the world of Sam Carver is convincing and well realized.
With the white supremacist narrative and his exploration of the Dark Web, Fleishman allows readers a glimpse into a truly frightening world, which he takes us even further into with his description of the paramilitary setup at the Crenshaw brothers’ home. The sense of menace and malign intelligence in this novel is powerful and unsettling. The serial killer narrative is not so convincing, however. Fleishman can’t resist giving Cross (like too many fictional serial killers) a certain superhuman aspect—she is able to contact Carver and taunt him whenever she likes. She dances in the street outside Carver’s apartment, choosing just the moment when he looks out the window so she can catch his eye meaningfully before she vanishes again. She is able to carry out crimes and leave no apparent trace of herself at the crime scene, though why any detective would ignore a message on a mirror using the call sign of a known stalker and serial killer is never quite explained. Bryant can only look mind-bogglingly dim in her determined refusal to believe that Cross had anything to do with Lily’s death. Probably wisely, Fleishman doesn’t attempt to explain and leaves it to readers to suspend their disbelief.
Good Night, Forever is fast-moving, engaging, and an enjoyable read, especially for fans of noir. While the denouement of the Cross story drags a bit given that the outcome does not come as a surprise, the resolution of the arson murders in the tent city is a classic whodunit surprise ending.
Recommended.
—Danuta Reah
MONKEY IN THE MIDDLE
By Loren D. Estleman
New York: Forge Books, 2022. $25.99
Monkey in the Middle is Loren D. Estleman’s latest addition—the thirtieth—to his long-running series featuring hard-drinking Detroit PI Amos Walker.
When Walker hears that his ex-wife, Catherine, has died, he experiences a tidal wave of complex and conflicting emotions. In the midst of this, he is approached for help by Shane Sothern, a journalist who has gotten himself involved in a deeply dangerous investigation. With Sothern refusing to tell Walker the full truth about his involvement in the case, Catherine’s death weighing on his mind, and the reemergence of professional assassin Frank Usher into Walker’s life, he has a lot to figure out. How did Usher know about Catherine’s death, why did he contact Walker, and what is his connection to Sothern’s case? Who is really pursuing Sothern? Estleman weaves all of these threads, and more, into a satisfyingly complex web that is perfectly unraveled by the book’s end.
As part of Sothern’s case, Walker works to track down whistleblower Abelia Hunt, whose whereabouts are also being sought by the authorities and possibly others. It seems Sothern has been helping her hide. When Walker finds a dead body along the way, he starts to question if his client is also involved in something more serious than aiding a friend. And Walker is faced with a dilemma: should he help his client and become complicit in hiding a wanted woman, or should he turn them both over to the authorities and possibly become implicated in a murder?
Sounds complicated, right? This isn’t the half of it. Estleman tells his story with humor and wit as he moves his characters at high speed around the noir world Walker inhabits. Woe betide any reader who isn’t quick enough to keep up. Estleman offers brief introductions to characters from Walker’s past, but beyond that, he takes no prisoners. Monkey in the Middle is a fun romp, but anyone new to the series should expect a few who? what? how? moments.
This fast-moving thriller is peopled with suitably hard-boiled characters, among whom the idealistic Sothern appears to be the archetypal chicken in a den of foxes. The monkey in the middle is the one who hears no evil. But what Walker needs is to hear the truth, and his pursuit of this comes close to costing him everything.
Entertaining.
—Danuta Reah
NEVER BROKEN:
A LISA JAMISON MYSTERY
By Lori Duffy Foster
Olney, MD: Level Best Books, 2022. $16.95 paperback
Never Broken is the second book in Lori Duffy Foster’s Lisa Jamison series. If you haven’t read her previous book, A Dead Man’s Eyes (2021), it’s probably preferable to read that novel first, as some of the events of A Dead Man’s Eyes are referred to in Never Broken, and the first novel provides more background for the character.
Lisa Jamison is a newspaper reporter who became a mother in her mid-teens and is currently raising her now-teenage daughter and dealing with the common tensions that arise when a child reaches that age. In Never Broken, Lisa is stunned when a strange man, looking more dead than alive, climbs into her car. Feeling more compassion than fear, she shields him from ominous men who are looking for him and quickly discovers that this man is a victim of modern-day slavery and has a connection to a long-cold missing-person case that has haunted Lisa for years.
Never Broken works in part because of its quietly powerful sense of moral outrage, covering the too-rarely-addressed topic of human trafficking and exploring why certain people are exploited and their suffering is kept hidden. Foster once worked as a crime reporter, so it’s reasonable to believe she’s drawing on her work experience, and Never Broken is in many ways a love letter to journalism that seeks to expose societal ills. Often, the books that stay with you the longest are the ones that cause you to look at the world in a different way, and Never Broken will make you wonder if sweatshops operated with forced labor are hidden in your city, tucked away in areas you never visit. Furthermore, the imagery of invisible victims who are treated as disposable commodities lingers long after the book is closed. Quietly resonant moral indignation gives Never Broken life, as it makes readers wonder if evil is proliferating in ways and places they never thought possible.
—Chris Chan
THE BURGLAR WHO MET FREDRIC BROWN
By Lawrence Block
New York: LB Productions, 2022. $19.99
In a world where the unexpected has become largely synonymous with the unwelcome, Lawrence Block has continued to surprise readers in a positive way. A published author since 1958, he is a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master who has received accolades from around the globe, including Edgar and Shamus Awards as well as the U.K. Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement. A convert to the conveniences of self-publishing, Block has continued to reissue older works of fiction and nonfiction while occasionally proffering new gems such as 2020’s Dead Girl Blues and, most recently, The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown—the thirteenth entry in his beloved Bernie Rhodenbarr Mysteries.
As the story opens, we find Bernie—a secondhand bookseller and recovering burglar—coveting the Kloppmann Diamond, which has recently been bought from the Museum of Natural History by billionaire Orrin Vandenbrinck. Both the contemptible businessman and the precious stone now reside in the penthouse suite of Manhattan’s Innisfree—a forty-two-story “sliver” apartment building made of steel and glass. Had it been a different time, Bernie might do more than covet. But the proliferation of technology such as security cameras has put a damper on his moonlighting. As Bernie opines, “Burglary and bookselling, not that far apart in the dictionary, and both of them proper Twentieth Century occupations that had withered and died in the new millennium.”
Then, after keeping company with science-fiction writer Fredric Brown’s What Mad Universe (1949)—about a man who finds himself living on an alternative plane—Bernie wakes up to discover that things are mostly the same but . . . slightly different. His Metrocard has inexplicably morphed into a “SubwayCard.” The torn-down Bowl-Mor has been resurrected. And business at Bernie’s store, Barnegat Books, is bustling. The Internet exists, sure, but nobody’s heard of Amazon or eBay as alternatives for buying (or selling) books. In this topsy-turvy, idealized world, Bernie soon realizes that all modernized impediments to the theft of the Kloppmann Diamond have disappeared. Buoyed by this discovery, he and his best friend, Carolyn, decide to embrace opportunity and team up for the heist. But their escapade ends in bullets and bodies.
Under suspicion for the theft and with a corpse in his workplace to explain, Bernie (along with Carolyn and Raffles the cat) has some explaining to do. The plot meanders agreeably, with plentiful literary digressions and pointed commentary on contemporary existence. But don’t take the asides for filler; rather, it’s good-natured fodder. Through it all, Bernie—morally sound despite his proclivities—is trying to make sense of the senseless, all while indulging in a flirtation that would never play out in the “real” world. Consequently, the bookstore-set denouement is a bit fact and a bit fantasy—further heightened by the knowledge that a return to reality is inevitable and only a matter of time.
Ultimately, The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown is a charmingly comedic caper that celebrates the past while making peace with the present, not to mention an admirably clever way of rebooting an unavoidably antiquated premise. This one’s a welcome diversion (if a departure) for Block and Bernie enthusiasts or anybody who’s feeling nostalgic for less complicated times or simply seeking a bit of whimsy—maybe the greatest gift a writer can offer his readers.
—John B. Valeri
NINE LIARS
By Maureen Johnson
New York: Katherine Tegen Books, 2022. $19.99
New York Times bestselling author Maureen Johnson—with series such as Shades of London, Scarlett, and Little Blue Envelopes—was already a force in the realm of YA fiction before cementing her status as a master of mayhem and murder with the Truly Devious series. This saga—and its more recent stand-alone installments—is something like the Nancy Drew mysteries for a new generation, being more inclusive, progressive, and realistic. (This is in no way a slam at the Nancy Drew books, which reflected a certain time and temperament and were also my own gateway to all other reading.) In the series’ fifth entry, Nine Liars, Johnson’s talents are on full display.
Teen sleuth (and high school senior) Stevie Bell is at a bit of a crossroads. After solving the case of The Box in the Woods (2021)—a 1970s camp counselors’ slaying—during summer break, she finds herself back at Ellingham Academy, a private school in the mountains of Vermont. Everybody’s making plans for the future, but she can’t seem to wrap her mind around term papers, let alone college admissions essays. And then there’s the fact that her renegade boyfriend, David, is studying abroad in England, doing God knows what while they’re apart. Which is why the opportunity to take an educational trip to London with her friends and fellow students Janelle, Vi, and Nate is particularly appealing.
When she arrives in London, David surprises her with an unsolved mystery to investigate. His classmate Izzy (is that all she is?) has an aunt who used to be part of a collegiate theatrical troupe called the Nine. One dark and stormy night in 1995, while drunk, they decided to play hide-and-seek at Merryweather, an English manor in Cambridge. (What could possibly go wrong?) The next morning, two of the friends were found murdered in the woodshed, struck down by an ax. The authorities believed a stranger committed the crime, and no arrests were ever made. But Stevie’s intuition tells her that one (or more) of the surviving seven could have been involved—and her curiosity may just reawaken a killer in their midst.
Johnson wisely alternates between past and present in the book’s early chapters, ensuring that the Nine come alive as dynamic, delightfully dysfunctional characters before death intervenes—and before Stevie and the gang take center stage and the others become a more peripheral, though pivotal, presence. But, for the first time in Stevie’s life, the pieces fail to come together, and she worries that this might be a whodunit beyond her abilities.
The change of scenery makes for a travelogue of sorts as Stevie and her friends visit historical highlights (including a Jack the Ripper tour, fittingly), while the English manor setting—as Johnson notes in the acknowledgments—allows her to pay homage to the Golden Age of detective fiction and fulfill her long-held personal desire to write such a book.
Johnson continues to slay with Nine Liars, another ingenious addition to the Truly Devious canon. She offers up not only an impressive brainteaser of a mystery but also a believably compassionate and often laugh-out-loud-funny take on modern teen life and love in all its colors and cadences. This series has infinite potential for expansion—and that’s the whole truth and nothing but.
—John B. Valeri
QUARRY’S BLOOD
By Max Allan Collins
London: Titan Books, 2022. $12.95
In this latest entry of Max Allan Collins’s Quarry series, the title character suffers a grievous loss in the wake of the pandemic, only to find a new and unexpected connection with someone who suddenly enters his life. The novels are named for the main character, John Quarry, a Marine sniper turned hit man who made his first appearance in the mid-1970s and has been involved in adventures ever since—except for a substantial hiatus in the series after the first several novels.
Quarry’s Blood works because Quarry as a character remains interesting throughout. While he is a professional killer, he has, along the way, developed a code of morality and chosen to focus his deadly talents on those who, in his own estimation, deserve it. As this novel opens, Quarry, still healthy and resourceful, is a senior citizen and has temporarily stepped away from his life of murder to enjoy a quiet retirement. Has he really become a changed man? The shattering of his normal lifestyle, caused not by violence but by something far more prosaic, shows that the beast within him was not dead but merely dormant. At first, he thinks he can hide from his legacy of bloodshed, but his hopes are upended when a younger woman visits him, professing to be a true-crime journalist who wants to turn his checkered career into a best-selling book.
Naturally, Quarry is not just shocked that a seemingly innocuous person has managed to track him down, but he’s worried that all the people he’s crossed over the course of decades of killing will be out for vengeance. And Quarry’s Blood proves the aging Quarry is still capable of killing with the best of them—tracking down villains with the help of an unexpected ally, while trying to ensure a safe future for himself during his “retirement” years. The result is a great deal of violence and darkness, so readers who prefer “cozy” mysteries might not consider this their cup of tea.
Quarry’s Blood doesn’t require familiarity with the series to be enjoyed, although it seems Max Allan Collins has brought in characters from earlier novels and put in a few references to previous books. There’s also a trace of meta referencing as there is the implication that Quarry is writing the novels himself.
The best part of the book is Quarry’s developing relationship with a new character, because it brings out a level of humanity and purpose in him that would otherwise be absent. Quarry is most compelling when he’s struggling to find his soul. The action of the book is well paced, and if you have a taste for gritty novels with morally ambiguous characters and well-crafted action scenes, Quarry’s Blood is certainly worth a look.
—Chris Chan
TAKE YOUR BREATH AWAY
By Linwood Barclay
New York: William Morrow, 2022. $27.99
Andrew Mason’s wife, Brie, disappeared six years ago under suspicious circumstances. The mystery has not been solved, and in the absence of a body or any other indication of what happened to her, Andrew is believed by many people, including the detective who led the investigation, to have killed her. Under the stress of this, his business failed and he developed a drinking problem.
Fast-forward to now, and Andrew is trying to put his life together, living with his pregnant girlfriend, Jayne, and her troubled brother, Tyler. But it is a life filled with secrets, as he has never revealed his past to Jayne. She knows nothing about Brie’s disappearance, the investigation, the suspicion that hangs over Andrew, and the widespread belief that he is a murderer.
And then a woman claiming to be Brie turns up at their old house, apparently with no memory of the past six years, unable to understand why it has changed and why her husband isn’t there. She appears twice more but is never seen up close enough for anyone to make a firm identification. Is she still alive, or is this an elaborate hoax? And if it’s a hoax, why?
Andrew’s life falls apart again. He is pursued by Brie’s vengeful family and by Marissa Hardy, the detective from the original investigation who has always believed Andrew is guilty.
Take Your Breath Away is a deceptively simple story that could easily have turned into a middle-of-the-road missing-wife thriller: troubled marriage, check; husband who behaves suspiciously, check; obsessive detective, check; vengeful family, check. But Barclay fills the pages with believable characters whose actions and motivations convince. He tells his story with page-turning intensity and maintains the suspense throughout. The narrative twists and turns. Barclay seeds it with subtle red herrings that take the plot down paths that seem to point to a clear solution, until it twists again, and again, keeping the reader guessing to the last page, all leading to a surprising, satisfactory ending that will have readers exclaiming, “Of course!”.
Don’t expect political commentary or philosophical musings about the nature of life and death or good and evil. This is not what Barclay is about. What he delivers is a gripping page-turner. Recommended.
—Danuta Reah
A WORLD OF CURIOSITIES
By Louise Penny
New York: Macmillan, 2022. $29.99
A World of Curiosities is the eighteenth novel in Louise Penny’s monumentally successful Chief Inspector Gamache series. This complex book explores the origins of the friendship between Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec and his second in command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and weaves together a narrative in which incidents from the past intertwine with the present.
A young man and woman, Sam and Fiona, are the survivors from the first murder investigation Gamache and Beauvoir carried out together. Gamache and his wife have supported them through what remains of their childhood. At the start of the book, the siblings return to Three Pines, but is the motivation for their visit benign, or has their traumatic past caught up with them?
Coinciding with their arrival, a letter is found from a long-dead stonemason, describing how he bricked up a room and the fear he felt while doing it. When the room is unsealed, investigators find a recently created copy of the well-known painting The Paston Treasure, also known as “A World of Curiosities.” The painting has been subtly altered from the original to contain details that gradually reveal a plot to kill Gamache. The chief inspector soon realizes that he and those he loves are in danger, but why and from whom remain unknown. To add an extra layer to the tale, Penny brings back super-intelligent murderer John Fleming, who hasn’t been too discommoded in his serial killing by being locked up in a secure facility. This is an engaging and arresting start to a dark and complex narrative.
Penny’s setting, Three Pines, is one of those places that is on a par with Agatha Christie’s St. Mary Mead and every other fictional quaint small town where murder seems to run rampant and bodies pile up. This tiny village in Québec is so isolated that it is not marked on any maps and is virtually devoid of modern communications technology. However, adventurous holiday makers who make their way there will find a community with a prosperous bistro, a thriving B&B (which always has vacancies), a bookstore, a world-renowned poet, a world-renowned painter, and a murder rate that makes Chicago look like the Hundred Acre Wood. Our unfortunate travelers are likely to have to pick their way around diverse murderers and the bodies of their victims. Three Pines is not the place to go for a stress-free vacation.
Penny handles her massively convoluted plot well. She is the master of narrative and produces a story that keeps the reader turning the pages toward an ending that is tense and fast-moving. It is beautifully written in places, with vivid descriptions, moments of poetry, and moments of lightness and wit. The context of Gamache and Beauvoir’s first case, the moral ambiguities of the two damaged children, and the ambiguity of Gamache’s own response to them would by themselves make a fascinating mystery. The serial killer, the secret room, and the painting all seem a bit tagged on, a bit overcomplicated.
However, fans of the series will no doubt love this book.
And the unfortunate tourists? Here’s some advice. There is an attractive county in England called Midsomer. That might be a more peaceful vacation spot.
—Danuta Reah
MURDER IN PROVENCE, SEASON 1
BritBox (streaming), 2022
Set in a sunny land of beautiful old buildings and lovely natural scenes, Murder in Provence is a British series set in the south of France. A BritBox streaming exclusive, the first season consists of three eighty-eight-minute episodes, featuring academics desperate to land a dream job in the wake of a prominent scholar’s retirement, the death of a prominent man at a dilapidated manor, and the possibly connected deaths of two very different women.
The investigators are Antoine Verlaque (Roger Allam) and Marine Bonnet (Nancy Carroll), and the cast is mostly English. Their British accents at first create the impression that we’re looking at a group of British expats, and it’s not until midway through the first episode that it’s made clear that everybody is French. Antoine is a local magistrate, and Marine, his paramour, is a psychologist who works with the authorities to identify criminals. In France, the magistrate actually directs the investigation.
The cast does a fine job, and the show is a delight to look at, a gorgeous travelogue peppered with murders. A lot of British series have been marred by their adherence to predictable tropes that reveal the identity of the killer within the first five minutes, but this series mostly avoids them. The solutions aren’t telegraphed too early, and the cluing will reap rewards for people who pay close attention to all the little details. There aren’t any moments, performances, or plot twists that will blow anybody’s mind, but everything is pretty solid. At times, though, the attempts to tie up the narrative with a happy little bow fall a bit flat.
Overall, the show is pleasant and enjoyable and somewhat in the vein of Midsomer Murders and The Brokenwood Mysteries. For viewers seeking a new series that’s visually beautiful, Murder in Provence is certainly worth a look.
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND
THE CASE OF THE YULETIDE PUZZLE
By Ed Trotta
London: MX Publishing, 2022. $8.95
Ed Trotta’s Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Yuletide Puzzle is a Christmas-themed novella adapted from a stage play. When Holmes’s holiday is interrupted by a cryptogram, he becomes obsessed with breaking the code; meanwhile, his obsession starts to chafe Dr. Watson.
While astute readers will be able to figure out the basic principle behind solving the cipher from the start, they probably won’t be able to actually crack the code unless they photocopy pages from the book or print out screenshots from their ebooks—at least at first. Later in the novel, some readers might be able solve the puzzle a little at a time with the help of Holmes’s clues. More cannot be said without spoilers, but readers who want to play along will be able to.
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Yuletide Puzzle is an entertaining tale, made more so by the interaction between Holmes and Watson, as it explores the minds of the men and their attitudes toward the science—or possibly the art—of detecting. The dialogue tends to focus on two subjects, Holmes’s connections to other people and the cipher itself, and other than a small bit in the middle of the book where it drags a bit, the narrative flows rather briskly.
I tend not to recommend that certain works be read only at certain times of the year, but I do think this story might take on an extra layer of fun during the holiday season. As much of an interactive game as a novella, Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Yuletide Puzzle is certainly worth a look for Sherlock Holmes fans and for those who love word puzzles.
—Chris Chan
RANDOM
By Penn Jillette
New York: Akashic Books, 2022. $27.95
Random, by Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller fame, is a picaresque mixture of crime, uncontrolled id, and chance, set on the neon-lit streets of Las Vegas.
The central character is Bobby Ingersoll, a young man eking out a living at a menial job driving an advertising vehicle down the Strip. He’s not too motivated to change his lot in life, until his father, a compulsive gambler, racks up a huge gambling debt. Bobby quickly learns there’s no way to earn that amount through honest labor in the two-week window provided by crime boss Fraser Ruphart. Ruphart really doesn’t really want the elder Ingersoll’s ledger cleared. He’s calculated that the brutal message he intends to send by torturing and massacring Bobby, his father, his mother, and his sister will encourage others to pay their debts on time—as well as provide an outlet for his own sadistic urges.
Left without options, Bobby desperately scavenges for money, until a chance encounter leaves him with a sufficient stake to go on a gambling run that could save his family, but only if he is fortunate enough to benefit from an incredible lucky streak that defies all odds and common sense. An unlikely roll of the dice saves the day, not only paying off the debt but also making Bobby wealthy enough to pursue all his wants and desires. Thanks to his windfall, Bobby becomes a devout adherent of “random,” the idea that every choice he makes is best decided by a roll of his lucky dice.
What makes this interesting is that we know from the get-go that there is something inherently wrong with Bobby’s philosophy. The opposite sides of real dice invariably add up to seven, but the dice on Random’s cover have a two and a five bordering each other and a three and a four also adjacent. These aren’t the dice you’ll find in Vegas, and the luck that Bobby enjoys is a combination of outlandish odds and his own rigging of the game. When Bobby chooses to give a roll of the dice to decide what direction he should take (ranging from what he eats, to the adventure he’ll try next, to the romantic prospect he’ll pursue or any other life path), he sets up the odds to suit his preferred outcome, and on the rare occasions when it doesn’t suit his wishes, it’s always at a time when the hand of fate saves him from a threat he doesn’t realize exists. As much as the narrator sneers at religion, it seems as if somebody up there must really like Bobby.
Random is a fun read, but if you think too much about the story and the messaging, you ultimately realize it can either end up as a morality tale or a fairy tale. The reader knows that all of the dice rolls have to go a certain way for most of the book: an unbroken streak of success until the very end. If you’re trying to decide if you should read it, why not pick up a pair of dice, set totals to determine whether you should buy it, borrow it from the library, get the audiobook, or ignore it altogether, and then give the dice a roll? That would definitely be in the spirit of Random.
—Chris Chan
THE STAIRCASE
Warner Bros. 2022, DVD $24.98
One of the greatest effects of the true-crime genre is that it has completely eviscerated the common criticisms claiming that certain fictional plot twists “aren’t realistic” or “couldn’t possibly happen in real life.” As the true story behind The Staircase proves, actual crimes can be filled with the kind of surprises that any editor would strike from a mystery writer’s manuscript on the grounds of implausibility.
The Staircase tells the story of the 2001 death of Kathleen Peterson, a businesswoman who was found brutally beaten at the base of a stairwell at her home. Despite her husband’s theory that it was an accident, the authorities judged the death to be a homicide, and Michael Peterson was soon arrested. The lengthy legal battle was marked by dramatic twists and shocking revelations, and much of it was captured by a French documentary team that took an interest in the case from the earliest stages.
In this limited series, which dramatizes the case, Colin Firth plays Michael, and Toni Collette portrays Kathleen. Though the series stays faithful to facts surrounding the core events, the creative team have fictionalized several details, characterizations, and conversations. While the actors did an excellent job of expressing their respective character’s emotions, the alternative perspectives and imaginary scenes blurred the emotional arc of each character.
The writers no doubt were trying to emphasize the uncertainty around the case and how lies have distorted so much. Barring a confession or some revolutionary forensic evidence, it’s probable that nobody will ever know the whole truth of that tragic night. Indeed, the series enacts Kathleen’s death in at least three separate ways, and by the end, it doesn’t take a conclusive stand on which, if any, is the truth.
Firth’s performance skillfully portrays the ambiguity of Michael’s character. The audience is sometimes primed to root for him and his exoneration, but on other occasions, viewers want him to receive a certain level of comeuppance, if not necessarily for the death of his wife, then definitely for his various lies and transgressions. Depending on the scene, he’s a loving family man, a figure of pity, a man so addicted to lying that he’s lost sight of what the truth is, a man trapped in a hell beyond his control, a manipulator who treats everybody around him as pawns, a slandered man desperately fighting for his life and dignity, and a host of polar opposites. Using the inflection of his voice, an unsettled look, or the flicker of an eye, Firth masterfully keeps viewers engaged in trying to glean some glimpse of who his character really is. Ultimately, viewers are left with water slipping through their fingers, as each unearthed secret and every revealed lie obscures not only the man but the truth of all of his relationships as well. Firth has to turn a cipher into a character, and he succeeds.
The cast is almost uniformly terrific, with Firth being the definite standout and Collette making Kathleen far more than a mere victim but a complex person with powerful emotions and hopes for a full life that was instead cut violently short. In the DVD special features, the creators declare that one of her last scenes, a hypothetical confrontation where Kathleen faces her husband’s secrets, is meant to give her a voice and dignity. And yet nearly all of her words are muted, and we only see her venting silently. It’s obvious that she would have been justified in feeling betrayed and angry, but this scene comes across as one more erasure of a woman who deserved better.
Unfortunately, on a couple of occasions, when the ambiguity that permeates so much of the performances would have been far more effective, the series falls into the old trap of telling rather than showing, with the audience being told what to think about one character through the laudatory comments of another character. These assessments aren’t backed up by anything earlier in the series, and these moments feel false. Nonetheless, The Staircase is filled with strong performances and an overwhelming sense of the destructive power of lies and suspicion. Watching the series won’t provide viewers with the truth of Kathleen’s death or the emotional truth lived by any of the main characters. However, while many takes on unsolved mysteries argue that the truth is ultimately unknowable and even illusory, The Staircase presents a strong case that lies are poison, and truth is the only antidote.
—Chris Chan
BLOOD MOON
By Heather Graham and Jon Land
New York: Tor, 2022. $28.99
Heather Graham and Jon Land are among the most prolific and versatile writers of their generation, offering genre-bending stories of both impressive quantity and quality. With more than two hundred fifty novels and novellas between them and accolades including the RWA Lifetime Achievement Award and the ITW ThrillerMaster Award for Graham and the 2019 Association of Rhode Island Authors Legacy Award for Land, their literary legacies are firmly set. The two first joined their formidable talents for 2017’s action-mystery mash-up The Rising. After a five-year hiatus, that saga continues with their second collaborative novel, Blood Moon.
The story begins the day after The Rising closed, when high school football star Alex Chin and his brainy tutor-turned-love-interest Samantha (“Sam”) Dixon realize their nightmare is far from over. Following the murder of his adoptive parents and their heroic attempts to neutralize a breach in the space-time continuum, it becomes apparent that otherworldly invaders are still in pursuit of Alex (who has a mysterious, and potentially lethal, computer chip implanted in his head)—and that the fate of the world hangs in the balance. If humanity is to be saved, they’ll have to be the ones to save it.
To orient readers, the book—which opens with a diary entry (Sam’s) that foreshadows its conclusion, as well as a brief historical prologue—goes back eighteen years. Alex, then an infant, is entrusted to a young warrior, Raiff, by his birth mother, Elaina. Both are members of the Resistance (who stand in opposition to murderous men/machines), and Raiff has been sent ahead to protect Alex in an alternative reality. Flash forward to the present day, and that threat has materialized. To defeat it, Alex and Sam—with some help from Raiff and others—must find and decode an aged book that holds the secrets to salvation. Doing so means traversing the globe and staying alive long enough to satisfy certain requirements.
The authors maintain a sustained sense of immediacy by shifting between characters and places with authority and alacrity. Consequently, the battle between good and evil gets an epic setup, and readers are swept along at breakneck speed as paths converge under a blood moon in the lost Mayan city of El Mirador. It’s a fascinating amalgamation of fact and fiction, further amplified by the potent melding of ancient history with modern science. The lines between what’s real and what isn’t may be a bit hazy, but that only heightens the underlying suspicion that something like this could happen (assuming it hasn’t already).
Blood Moon is an inescapably engrossing tale of sacrifice and survival. While The Rising was tinged with the innocence and idealism of youth, Alex and Sam have grown quickly into the adults they were destined to become. Graham and Land infuse the narrative with plentiful action, drama, romance, and sci-fi, ensuring that there’s a little something (or a lot of it) for everyone. The book’s conclusion is both emotionally resonant and viscerally thrilling—and offers the promise of more to come. We can hope the wait will be a shorter one this time around.
—John B. Valeri