As untidy and unflinching as a tornado whose eye is more frightful still.
Twenty-five years after a double murder stunned the little town of Everly, Washington, a copycat seems to be following in the original killer’s path.
If you ask veteran Everly sheriff Samantha Mason, there’s never been any doubt who killed Timothy and Rebecca Parker, a pair of brilliant mathematicians who taught at the local college, and plunged their three young daughters into foster care. It was their teenage son, Alex, who’d already displayed troubling enough behavior to put his school counselor on alert even before he wrote a story about a cannibal serial killer a few days before his parents’ deaths. But Alex died, too, obligingly leaving behind a confessional suicide note to head off any doubts about his guilt. Now Delaney Moore, a content moderator for a social media site, has pulled a video showing the corpses of Bob and Gina Balducci, one of whom had an uncomfortable relationship with the Parkers, staged in a remarkably similar scene. The discovery brings FBI agent Callum Kilkenny to Everly, along with FBI forensic linguist Raisa Susanto, who’s trying to live down a fatal mistake she made in identifying the author of an anonymous missive from the idiolectic patterns in which she specializes. As Raisa beats the bushes for evidence she can use to redeem herself, she (naturally) doesn’t realize that Labuskes is alternating the chapters that track the stages of her investigation with chapters from the viewpoint of Delaney, whose consistent determination to take violent revenge on anyone who’s ever wronged her leaves Raisa’s own troubled childhood in the dust. So Raisa never has a chance to read that “Delaney wasn’t made for love. She was made for death.”
As untidy and unflinching as a tornado whose eye is more frightful still.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781662511363
Page Count: 351
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The most richly accomplished of the brothers’ pairings to date—and given Connelly’s high standards, that’s saying a lot.
Harry Bosch and the Lincoln Lawyer team up to exonerate a woman who’s already served five years for killing her ex-husband.
The evidence against Lucinda Sanz was so overwhelming that she followed the advice of Frank Silver, the B-grade attorney who’d elbowed his way onto her defense, and pleaded no contest to manslaughter to avoid a life sentence for shooting Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Roberto Sanz in the back as he stalked out of her yard after their latest argument. But now that her son, Eric, is 13, old enough to get recruited by local gangs, she wants to be out of stir and at his side. So she writes to Mickey Haller, who asks his half-brother for help. After all his years working for the LAPD, Bosch is adamant about not working for a criminal defendant, even though Haller’s already taken him on as an associate so that he can get access to private health insurance and a UCLA medical trial for an experimental cancer treatment. But the habeas corpus hearing Haller’s aiming for isn’t, strictly speaking, a criminal defense proceeding, and even a cursory examination of the forensic evidence raises Bosch’s hackles. Bolstered by Bosch’s discoveries and a state-of-the-art digital reconstruction of the shooting, Haller heads to court to face Assistant Attorney General Hayden Morris, who has a few tricks up his own sleeve. The endlessly resourceful courtroom back-and-forth is furious in its intensity, although Haller eventually upstages Bosch, Morris, and everyone else in sight. What really stands out here, however, is that Connelly never lets you forget, from his title onward, the life-or-death issues behind every move in the game.
The most richly accomplished of the brothers’ pairings to date—and given Connelly’s high standards, that’s saying a lot.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780316563765
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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