Suspenseful—and silly.
A hellish road trip from the author of Home Before Dark (2020) and Lock Every Door (2019).
After her roommate and best friend is murdered, Charlie Jordan decides that she has to get away from Olyphant University. She’s posting a flyer looking for someone to give her a ride home when she meets a stranger who just happens to be going her way. This is Sager’s fifth novel, and readers familiar with his brand of psychological horror know that he favors high-concept plots. Here, the whole narrative unfolds over one long, eventful night in 1991. Sager’s fans may also recognize that Charlie fits a type. She’s a heroine who doesn’t seem much interested in self-preservation; another way to put that is that she behaves in ways that are astonishingly stupid—again and again and again. In the opening pages, she spends a lot of time wondering if it seems reasonable for a young woman who just lost her friend to a serial killer to travel across two states with a man she’s never met. It doesn’t seem reasonable at all, but this is what has to happen if Sager is going to write the story he wants to write, so….The whole first half of the novel is Charlie discovering that her driver may not be who he says he is, that he may plan to do her harm. This feels like a lot of time to spend establishing something that every reader is going to assume. The back end, though, is filled with twists. When these dramatic turns are genuinely surprising, it’s because they are absurdly baroque. In other instances, they are as inevitable as the denouement of a Greek tragedy. Oh, and there’s also some business about Charlie’s love of classic film and history of trauma combining to create a singular condition in which she momentarily leaves reality behind and gets lost in cinematic fantasy. This makes very little sense, but it’s occasionally important to the plot. Despite its flaws, readers who decide to just give in and go along for the ride will have a diverting couple of hours ahead of them.
Suspenseful—and silly.Pub Date: June 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18316-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.
The loss of her police officer father and the discovery of an abandoned car in a local lake raise chilling questions regarding a young woman’s family history.
When Hazel Sharp returns to her hometown of Mirror Lake, North Carolina, for her father’s memorial, she and the other townspeople are confronted by a challenging double whammy: As they’re grieving the loss of beloved longtime police officer Detective Perry Holt, a disturbing sight appears in the lake, whose waterline is receding because of an ongoing drought—an old, unidentifiable car, which has likely been lurking there for years. Hazel temporarily leaves her Charlotte-based building-renovation business in the capable hands of her partners and reconnects with her brothers, Caden and Gage; her Uncle Roy; her old fling and neighbor, Nico; and her schoolfriend, Jamie, now a mother and married to Caden. Tiny, relentless suspicions rise to the metaphorical surface along with that waterlogged vehicle: There have been a slew of minor break-ins; two people go missing; and then, a second abandoned car is discovered. The novel digs deeper into Hazel’s family history—her father was a widow when he married Hazel’s mother, who later left the family, absconding with money and jewels—and Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation: “Everything mattered disproportionately in a small town. Your success, but also your failure. Everyone knows might as well have been our town motto.”
Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781668010440
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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