Deadly Animals, Marie Tierney’s brilliantly plotted debut mystery, introduces readers to Ava Bonney: a 14-year-old English girl obsessed with decomposing bodies.
Deadly Animals, Marie Tierney’s brilliantly plotted debut mystery, introduces readers to Ava Bonney: a 14-year-old English girl obsessed with decomposing bodies.
Nothing is more mysterious than the family we were born into. Amateur sleuths Lena Scott and Claudia Lin don’t quite fit in with their blood relatives, but the solutions to their respective cases may lie within the bonds they’ve known their whole lives.
“I found out my sister was back in New York from Instagram. I found out she’d died from the New York Daily News.” These arresting first lines of Kellye Garrett’s Like a Sister alert the reader that this family-oriented thriller is anything but ordinary.
Lena Scott and her younger half-sister, Desiree Pierce, have little in common. Lena’s a serious grad student living with her grandmother’s widow in the Bronx, while Manhattan-based ex-reality star Desiree blows through men, clothes and substances as fast as she can spend the money from their father, music industry titan Mel Pierce. But when Desiree sees the newspaper headline, she knows there’s more to her sister’s death than a simple heroin overdose. Desiree was afraid of needles, and why was she found shoeless near Lena’s own neighborhood, when the women have been estranged for two years?
Garrett wrote for the television show “Cold Case”before publishing her award-winning debut novel, Hollywood Homicide, and its follow-up, Hollywood Ending, and in Like a Sister, she incorporates issues of race, class and, most of all, the complicated ties that bind into a twisty murder mystery with nuance and heart.
Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, Claudia Lin knows she’s a complete disappointment to her family. The narrator of Jane Pek’s The Verifiers, Claudia has neither a nice Chinese husband nor a lucrative job. She likes women and hasn’t yet told her mother, and unbeknownst to her successful older brother, Charles, she has left the full-time position he’d helped her snag. Instead, as the newest staff member of Veracity, a top-secret firm in glamorous Tribeca, Claudia helps would-be lovers uncover the true identities of online paramours and expose any skeletons in their closets.
When one of Claudia’s first clients, Iris Lettriste, is found dead in her apartment, Claudia discovers that Iris had her own secret: She wasn’t Iris Lettriste at all. Who was “Iris,” and could her online presence and virtual network be the keys to figuring out who killed her?
Claudia is a scrappy, resourceful protagonist. She’s a dedicated cyclist who can and will bike anywhere, she’s a huge fan of a fictional mystery series starring the brilliant Inspector Yuan, and thanks to Veracity, she has invasive but effective tracking devices at her fingertips. Pek’s beautifully paced debut offers a hard look at our digital lives and the people we surround ourselves with IRL. It’ll have readers asking, along with Claudia, “Could a dating app, and the forces behind it, actually kill me?”
New York City is full of mysteries—and two smart amateur sleuths are on the case.
British author Janice Hallett’s The Appeal is a cleverly constructed, meticulously detailed, often hilarious epistolary novel that kicks off with an intriguing premise. Senior law partner Roderick Tanner gives young lawyers Charlotte and Femi an important new project. In just a few days, they must work their way through a mountain of correspondence (texts, emails, instant messages) and other materials (newspaper clippings, flyers, receipts) crucial to the appeal he’ll soon be filing. But he doesn’t tell them who’s done what; he wants them to immerse themselves, to come to their own conclusions about the people in question. And quickly!
Hallett deputizes the reader right along with the lawyers with this approach, which gradually engenders an understanding of—and fascination with—a family-led amateur theater group. The close-knit Fairway Players, who are based in a small town outside London, are led by director Martin Hayward and his wife (and leading lady), Helen. They’re one big happy theatrical family, ready to mount a production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, until tragedy strikes. Martin and Helen’s granddaughter, Poppy, is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and enormously pricey experimental treatments are the only possible cure. Fundraising appeals begin in earnest alongside preparations for the play, and the stress soon begins to show in snippy text threads, contentious group chats and lots and lots of duplicitous emails.
It’s mightily impressive how skillfully Hallett shades in her characters’ personalities and ulterior motives, especially since so many of them are actors and thus adept at emotional manipulation. The layers of revelation are plentiful and pleasing—as is the feeling that, as the pages turn, the culprits and their intentions are becoming increasingly clear. Or are they? A long list of suspects (15 by this reviewer’s count!) and an endlessly shifting mass of clues add up to twists and misdirects that will keep readers a captive audience until the very end of this thought-provoking and deliciously dramatic debut.
Janice Hallett’s The Appeal is a cleverly constructed, meticulously detailed, often hilarious epistolary novel of suspense.
Anne Perry’s new Victorian murder mystery, Half Moon Street, begins in classic style, with the finding of a body. But this one isn’t in the drawing room of a country mansion; it’s in a small boat drifting against a London dock. It is the body of a man. His hands are manacled, and he is shockingly attired in a woman’s dress.
The constable who finds the body warns our hero, Superintendent Thomas Pitt, the head of the Bow Street Police Station, that scandal is waiting in the wings. He fears the body is that of a missing French diplomat. Soon Pitt is caught up in a tour of the dark underside of Victorian London, trying to find out where the worlds of diplomacy and the theater have crossed paths — and why the encounter ended in murder. The tour is far-ranging and allows the author to paint a mural of the times.
Although Anne Perry is not the only contemporary author to set mystery novels in the foggy, charming days of Sherlock Holmes, nonetheless, she has made the era her own. Because of her chosen milieu, Perry is predictably compared to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens. Actually, although she shares their taste for the grotesque, she lacks their easy humor and writerly sensitivity to language. Her style is plain and straightforward, her emphasis on the social interactions of a busy period.
What amuses Perry is to populate her novels with prominent figures, and give us glimpses inside the lives of the people that made the era so significant in history. In the case of Half Moon Street, they include Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and some of their illustrious colleagues. The surprising element in these mysteries is that the secondary characters are deeply engaged in social issues and the arts, thereby pulling Pitt into controversies outside the world of crime. For example, when Pitt attends a play, he finds himself immersed in the feminist issues of the day.
These are topics usually overlooked or ignored in period mysteries, and they lend Perry’s books a lively cultural tone. Readers get to experience the pace of a changing world through the eyes of intelligent observers such as Thomas and his wife Charlotte, all while piecing together clues and moving closer to the author’s famously satisfying denouements. It’s a powerful combination and, after two decades, explains Perry’s still-growing reputation.
Anne Perry's new Victorian murder mystery, Half Moon Street, begins in classic style, with the finding of a body. But this one isn't in the drawing room of a country mansion; it's in a small boat drifting against a London dock. It is the body…
Mystery fans and dog lovers alike will enjoy Peggy Rothschild’s A Deadly Bone to Pick, the first in a new cozy mystery series featuring former police officer-turned-dog trainer Molly Madison.
Looking for a fresh start after the death of her husband, Molly makes a cross-country move to California. With her loyal golden retriever, Harlow, at her side, Molly hopes to heal and put down roots in the coastal town of Pier Point. On her first day there, she befriends a slobbery Saint Berdoodle (named Noodle) and volunteers to train him after learning that his owner can’t properly care for him. But when her new charge digs up a severed hand on the beach, Molly quickly goes from new kid on the block to murder suspect.
Readers will enjoy Rothschild’s fast-paced and well-plotted mystery, especially its small beach community setting. In Pier Point, the locals keep tabs on their neighbors, and everyone has a secret to hide. The town is filled with memorable characters, including Miguel Vasquez, the handsome detective investigating the murder, and Ava, Molly’s precocious 8-year-old neighbor who’s in need of tips for both training her dog and making friends her own age.
Molly’s lessons to other Pier Point residents and their dogs blend seamlessly into the central mystery, and animal lovers will appreciate seeing the reality of loving and living with pets depicted on the page. Rothschild shows that while it’s easy to love our dogs, they can also be a lot of work: There’s no sleeping in for Molly, not when Harlow needs to be let outside or fed. A Deadly Bone to Pick is a satisfying debut that will leave readers eager for more adventures with Molly and her canine companions.
Mystery fans and dog lovers alike will enjoy Peggy Rothschild’s A Deadly Bone to Pick, the first in a new cozy mystery series featuring former police officer-turned-dog trainer Molly Madison.
A speculative spy thriller Tim Powers is a masterful melder of fact and fiction, reality and unreality, realism and surrealism. This foremost North American magic realist (author of The Anubis Gates, World Fantasy Award-winner Last Call, Earthquake Weather and many others) mesmerizes readers with hidden layers of plots and conspiracies. His latest novel, Declare, is vintage Powers speculative fiction based on documented facts. Fact: Kim Philby was a British intelligence operative who defected to the Soviet Union. Fact: Philby worked for both sides and precipitated the greatest British cold war spy scandal. Fact: Philby spent years in the Middle East with his father, a noted Arabist. Powers excels at connecting historical dots his own way, placing Philby precisely where he was at any given time, but with different and far more fanciful motivations. In Nazi-occupied Paris, British double agent Andrew Hale proves a worthy nemesis for Philby, though his connection to the stuttering spy remains mysterious until a chilling climax on Mount Ararat’s frozen peak. In the early 1960s, Hale is called back to atone for his failure on Mount Ararat years before, when the men he led were either killed or driven insane. Hale’s journey is a mind-blowing trip through the cold war.
Blending his Le CarrŽ-style plot with history, theology, the Arabian Nights and the true nature of the ankh (anchor), Powers proves how vibrant fantasy can be. If you yearn for an original, innovative author, you can’t miss with Tim Powers.
A speculative spy thriller Tim Powers is a masterful melder of fact and fiction, reality and unreality, realism and surrealism. This foremost North American magic realist (author of The Anubis Gates, World Fantasy Award-winner Last Call, Earthquake Weather and many others) mesmerizes readers with hidden…
Janice Hallett has worked as a journalist, magazine editor and government speechwriter in her native England. Now she’s adding novelist to her CV with The Appeal, an inventive and darkly funny epistolary mystery set in the drama-filled world of amateur theater. In this Q&A, Hallett revisits her own theatrical experiences and reveals what it was like to construct a story with no fewer than 15 viable suspects.
The many plausible suspects in The Appeal make it great fun to play amateur sleuth while reading. Was it fun to write? Did you change your mind as you went along, in terms of who you wanted the murderer to be, or did you always know whodunit? It was huge fun, not least because I wrote it entirely on spec, with no deadline except a vague feeling I didn’t want to spend longer than a year working on it. At the start, I had no idea who the victim or murderer was going to be. I let the story evolve as it went along, then did some intricate reverse engineering to make what I wrote in the end fit the beginning.
Before writing this book, you’ve written and directed plays. Did that give you the confidence to dive right into an epistolary novel with lots of layers and complexities and characters? My scriptwriting background played into The Appeal for sure. A stage play is a bunch of characters interacting before your eyes. An epistolary novel is the exact same, but in your mind’s eye. I have to say the greatest confidence-building aspect of playwriting is its immediacy. The performance is live—you have actors giving their skill and energy to bring your characters to life—and the audience is live—watching and listening to the story you wrote. There is no hiding place. If it doesn’t work, you and everyone else in the room will know it. If it does work . . . let’s just say nothing will ever beat the moment that first audience laughed at the first joke in my first play. I was hooked from that day on.
“At the start, I had no idea who the victim or murderer was going to be.”
How did you keep track of all of the messages, notes, transcripts, etc., that you created? Were there pushpins, sticky notes, whiteboards and/or spreadsheets involved? Did you harken back to any of your own correspondence as you created your characters’ varied communication styles? Strangely, I made very few notes. I did a lot of scrolling back and forth though, and paid particular attention to how each character opened and signed off, so I had a lot of information to keep in my head. I most certainly took inspiration from 20 years of email correspondence, both professional and personal. Email communication is a great leveler. What we don’t write speaks just as loudly as anything we do. What’s exposed are aspects of your true self, such as your empathy, your attention to detail and how you really feel about the person you’re “speaking” to. I’m quite sad to see texting and messaging take over from good old-fashioned email.
You chose to not include correspondence from certain characters, such as enigmatic newcomers Sam and Kel. Instead, we learn about them through others’ impressions and opinions. What motivated you to reveal versus conceal particular characters or events in your story? This was a happy accident, but it ended up being the aspect of The Appeal I am most proud of. When I first decided to write a novel, I’d had a vague idea for a TV series (I was working as a TV writer at the time) about a couple who return from overseas volunteering and whose experiences there inform their suspicions about a local fundraising campaign. When I started the novel, I thought why not take the same story but present it as emails that fly back and forth—“offstage” so to speak—between minor players. That’s why we don’t hear from the three main characters, and I think it’s one of the most effective devices in the book.
The Fairway Players is a close-knit theater troupe presided over by Martin and Helen Hayward. When the power couple shares that their granddaughter has been stricken with a rare cancer, the group fundraises like mad in hopes of paying for pricey experimental treatments. What made you want to explore crowdfunding? When I started the novel in 2018, I’d noticed a proliferation of crowdfunding campaigns on Facebook raising money for drugs or medical treatments abroad. It struck me how enthusiastically people pull together and how fast money can be raised that way. But at the same time, money is like blood: It attracts sharks, like drug companies who capitalize on families’ desperation, or even ordinary people who have debts to pay or simple terminal greed and a complete lack of morals. Cases in which someone has blatantly lied about their child’s (or their own) illness to raise money from friends and family have appalled and fascinated me in equal measure.
“What we don’t write speaks just as loudly as anything we do.”
Tight bonds are formed in theater troupes, whether via growing into roles together, shared nervousness as the premiere approaches or camaraderie after a show well done. What drew you to exploring what happens when such a strong bond begins to fray? A drama group becomes like a family, with emotional bonds among the members—and just like in a family, the stakes can suddenly become much higher. Even when things are falling apart, you can’t just walk away: The show must go on.
There are insiders and outsiders in The Appeal, which makes for lots of tension bubbling under the surface as the players jockey for social dominance. What about that sort of group dynamic fascinates you most? Like most writers, I’m a natural outsider. In fact, when I attend writerly events, and I’m in a room full of outsiders, I’m still the outsider, so that dynamic is very familiar to me. But I’m truly fascinated by people who are the opposite: natural socializers, witty and funny, able to hold the attention of a crowd and get them onside. Charisma is magical. It can elevate someone through the social hierarchy by osmosis.
In The Appeal, there are characters whose social standing is earned by their proximity to the alpha family. When you arrive in a strong, tightknit community like that, it can be hard to find your place in it. Sam and Kel slowly work their way in, but Issy, who has been there much longer, struggles to be accepted by anyone. The social hierarchy can be horribly unfair, as can individuals, who might choose to ally themselves with the strongest character, rather than the nicest or most deserving person in the group.
The Appeal is often very funny, with sharp insights into the ways in which certain types of people ingratiate themselves, manipulate a situation or gleefully gossip. Does writing humor come naturally to you? Do you consider yourself a funny person? If you want to empty a room in double-quick time, get me to tell a joke. While I wouldn’t say I’m funny in person, I gravitate toward comedy when I’m writing. Making people laugh is a powerful tool to help you engage them with your story. Having said that, if you’re writing a thriller in which the aim is to build tension, you have to be very careful how you use humor, because laughter in that instance will disperse the tension immediately. It’s a tricky balance!
Can you share with us a bit about the significance of having your fictional Fairway Players stage a production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons? The Raglan Players staged All My Sons in 2010. It was one of the more serious, grittier plays we did over the years, among many light comedies and farces. It was a huge challenge I’m proud to say we rose to. I think if you’re familiar with the play, there will be an added layer of intrigue. It’s about the death of a couple’s son, which the audience grows to suspect is either directly or tangentially their fault. It has a very strong female lead role, that of a woman who lives in a world of her own. I’ll say no more!
What’s next for you? Any upcoming books or other projects you’d like to tell us about? My second novel, The Twyford Code, launched in the U.K. in January 2022. It’s about a former prisoner who, at the suggestion of his probation officer, sets out to investigate the disappearance of his teacher on a school trip in 1983. It will be published by Atria in the U.S. in 2023. I’m currently writing my third novel, and there’s a fourth percolating in my mind at this very moment.
Author photo by Gaia Banks.
Author Janice Hallett revisits her theatrical experiences and shows how they helped her construct her darkly funny epistolary mystery, The Appeal.
ÊDeep South, the latest installment in the wildly popular Anna Pigeon series, finds our intrepid park ranger assigned to the Natchez Trace Parkway in rural Mississippi. In the wee hours of the morning, as she pilots her Rambler (can she be the only heroine in history who drives a Rambler?) through the pre-dawn gloom, she spies a hand painted sign nailed to a tree: REPENT. Then another, this one riddled with bullet holes: REPENT; FINAL WARNING. Anna has been on the road for 22 hours straight, surely a record for a Rambler, en route from her last posting at Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, and she is beginning to have the unsettling feeling that she has made a mistake.
Her meager possessions unloaded from a small U-Haul trailer, Anna settles in to her role as district ranger. As is usually the case in Barr’s novels (and Anna’s life), things don’t stay quiet for long. It seems a local high school girl has gone missing on prom night. When Anna’s black lab, Taco, unearths a bloody scarf near the site of a recent disturbance, Anna suspects the worst. Her fears are borne out with the discovery of a girl’s body, hastily disposed of in the deep woods. The bloody sheet over the girl’s head, Ku Klux Klan style, has the earmarks of a political bombshell.
The plot thickens as Anna discovers that the Caucasian victim was carrying on a secret (well, not entirely) relationship with a black college football hero. Add to that the fact that her prom date, an obnoxious white jock, is withholding information on the crime, and you have the beginnings of a case that could have racial implications far beyond the boundaries of Mississippi.
Several of the persistent regional stereotypes are addressed in Deep South, including Civil War reenactments, old time religion, the lingering racial prejudices on both sides of the color line, and even the high school girls’ predilection for wearing copious quantities of cosmetics. As with the previous Anna Pigeon novels, Deep South is fast-paced and well-crafted. Ms. Barr is on familiar ground here, as she makes her home in Mississippi, and has served as a park ranger in the Natchez Trace Parkway area.
Bruce Tierney is a writer in Nashville, Tennessee.
ÊDeep South, the latest installment in the wildly popular Anna Pigeon series, finds our intrepid park ranger assigned to the Natchez Trace Parkway in rural Mississippi. In the wee hours of the morning, as she pilots her Rambler (can she be the only heroine in…
All you really need for a good nature thriller is a scary animal attack. True North supplies a satisfactory one, and throws in a scary human one as well, so nothing else is required for the reader here but a comfortable sofa and the off switch on the television remote control.
Don’t let the author’s formidable name spook you into saving her first novel for your more literary moments. True, this book is thoughtful, and will raise your consciousness about the anomalous position of Native Americans in the state of Alaska. Mainly though, it wants to alert you to the extraordinary ambiance of the place and give you a thrill along the way.
Bailey Lockhart carries baggage from a traumatic New England past when she becomes a bush pilot in the wilds of Alaska. She keeps the past at bay by buying a piece of wilderness land and burying herself in the routine of sheer survival. For six years it works, but suddenly the arrival of a naively arrogant young couple forces her out of her protected isolation and reopens her cache of hurt. What’s more, this painful episode comes at a time when the local native population has begun to splinter in its varying reactions to U.
S. government policies, and she is caught between renewed discomfort as a white outsider and her affection for the people, especially Kash, the leader of the more peaceful local political movement.
Eventually she is forced by circumstance and coincidence to come to terms with her wounded and wounding memories though not before death and a clarified love intervene.
Kafka is a certified wilderness emergency medical technician, comfortable in the wilds of both Alaska and Wisconsin, and has taught writing and literature at the University of Michigan and elsewhere. Her early brashly driven prose softens into a lover’s appreciation of a familiar country, where the human beings do not always live up to the land. As first novels so often do, this one improves before your eyes, gaining skill and grace with each succeeding page.
Alaska will always steal the show, of course, but read this one for the traditional thriller values of suspense and a good story. Popcorn is optional.
Maude McDaniel is a reviewer in Cumberland, Maryland.
All you really need for a good nature thriller is a scary animal attack. True North supplies a satisfactory one, and throws in a scary human one as well, so nothing else is required for the reader here but a comfortable sofa and the off…
If you’ve read one Larry Bond novel (The Enemy Within, Red Phoenix, etc.), you’ve probably read them all. Of course, if you’ve read them all, then you’re like me, and you’ve continued to enjoy his escapist, globe-trotting thrillers and tales of semi-plausible headlong plunges toward the end of the world as we know it. Do the good guys win? I’ll give you one good guess. Are the bad guys really, really bad . . . I mean bad on a world-shaking, civilization-destroying level? Sure are. Is the technology pretty darned cool and yet at the same time frighteningly real? Yes again, and that’s the heart of Bond’s success, especially in his latest, Day of Wrath. Bond, who was an uncredited partner and consultant on Tom Clancy’s early books, knows his stuff, and his expertise shows in descriptions of everything from handguns to nuclear missiles.
The heroes of 1997’s Enemy Within, Colonel Peter Thorn and FBI Special Agent Helen Gray, return in Day of Wrath to battle yet another Middle Eastern terrorist overlord bent on destroying the decadent country of America. (One quibble: It seems sort of easy and predictable to make the villain an Arab . . . again. Surely there are bad guys elsewhere. In Bond’s favor, though: The top henchmen of key villain Prince Ibrahim are ex-East German secret policeman. It’s a new world.) The action moves from the forests of Russia to the streets of Berlin to Washington, D.
C.’s Virginia suburbs, with stops for gunplay at many places along the way. The reason for all the chasing is that Thorn and Gray are the only people who know the secret of Ibrahim’s “Operation,” a secret I won’t reveal here, but suffice to say the title of the book is appropriate. The duo is forced to take extreme measures to safeguard themselves and the secret in a typically nail-biting race to the “whew-that-was-close” climax. Along the way, the romance between Thorn and Gray that budded in the previous Bond book blooms brightly. Their between-the-gunshots romantic by-play seems a little forced sometimes, but gives a more human flavor to the out-there proceedings.
However out-there the plot gets, the kernel of truth and dangerous possibility that lies at its heart forces the reader to consider the “what-if factor.” I hope that if there’s a real Prince Ibrahim out there, we have more than just two people to stop him, but for now, the resourceful Thorn and the sturdy Gray will do nicely.
Reviewed by James Buckley, Jr.
If you've read one Larry Bond novel (The Enemy Within, Red Phoenix, etc.), you've probably read them all. Of course, if you've read them all, then you're like me, and you've continued to enjoy his escapist, globe-trotting thrillers and tales of semi-plausible headlong plunges toward…
Mystery novelist and amateur sleuth Lady Amy Lovell is back in The Mystery of Albert E. Finch, the latest installment in Callie Hutton’s Victorian Book Club Mystery series.
The novel kicks off with Amy’s wedding to Lord William Wethington, a fellow member of the Mystery Book Club of Bath. During the celebratory wedding breakfast, Amy’s cousin, Alice Finch, is poisoned and collapses face-first into her meal. There’s no reviving Mrs. Finch, and soon the Wethington wedding reception is declared a crime scene.
Local detectives charge Mrs. Finch’s husband, Albert, with her murder, but Amy isn’t sure that he’s guilty. With their honeymoon on hold, Amy and William put their sleuthing skills to the test and begin their own investigation. When a second body turns up, the newlyweds must race to figure out who is poisoning their wedding guests—and why.
Hutton’s Victorian-era Bath is a delightful setting, even given the murders taking place in its streets. And it’s easy to root for the newlywed sleuths, whose relationship is clearly rooted in friendship and respect. Though the story takes a humorous turn when several of Amy’s relatives unexpectedly move into the couple’s home, The Mystery of Albert E. Finch also addresses issues like misogyny and classism with grace and heart.
There’s a running joke about William’s disappointment in his delayed honeymoon that goes on for a bit too long and loses steam, but overall, Hutton’s writing is sharp and witty. Amy and William are in top form, and readers will enjoy reuniting with them and the rest of the Mystery Book Club in this consistently pleasurable cozy mystery.
The latest Victorian Book Club Mystery takes on issues like misogyny and classism with grace and heart.
“Welcome to Black Harbor, you’ll love it here!” said no one ever, as quickly becomes evident in Hannah Morrissey’s gritty gothic-noir thriller, Hello, Transcriber, which is set in a fictional Wisconsin city with the highest crime rate in the state and a rising suicide rate to match.
People frequently leap from Forge Bridge, a spot that Hazel Greenlee finds herself drawn to time and again. The 26-year-old has been in Black Harbor for two years as the trailing spouse of aquatic ecologist Tommy. They’ve been together since they were 16, but romance has long since departed. Their lives orbit around his drinking and hunting, and the terrible sex he demands every three days. Her vivacious influencer/radio DJ sister, Elle, is no safe harbor: The two are often at odds, not least because Hazel feels bland by comparison.
When she takes a night shift job as a transcriber at the police department, Hazel hopes to find fodder for the novel-in-progress she believes will help her escape Black Harbor at last. During one shift, Investigator Nikolai Kole’s alluring “Hello, Transcriber” fills her headphones—and Hazel’s drug-addled neighbor, Sam, writes a message in the frost on her office window with a severed finger that isn’t his. To Hazel, this is terrifying but intriguing. After all, she reminds herself, the saying is “Write what you know.” If she helps Nik investigate Sam’s ties to a mysterious drug dealer called Candy Man, she’ll know plenty.
Time squeezes in on them: Children are overdosing, Hazel feels like she’s being watched and she and Nik are undeniably attracted to each other. But as Nik often says, everybody lies in Black Harbor. Will Hazel see the twisted truth before it’s too late?
Thanks to its finely tuned bleakness and unflinching exploration of human depravity, Hello, Transcriber is a suspenseful, often shudder-inducing series kickoff that will appeal to fans of atmospheric thrillers or true crime, as well as anyone curious about what it’s like to be a police transcriber. Morrissey, who was one for a few years, makes it sound truly interesting, horrors aside. One hopes real-life transcribers’ shifts are far less eventful than Hazel’s.
n his latest thriller, Deep Sleep, Charles Wilson returns to one of his favorite themes: murder and mayhem triggered by a foreign invasion of the mind. The author of several best-selling scientific thrillers, Wilson has a knack for crafting riveting plot lines around kernels of scientific fact. In Deep Sleep, he focuses on treatment for sleep disorders, and ventures into a mysterious world of mind games played with hypnosis, Cajun voodoo and hallucinatory drugs. Wilson has chosen the South Louisiana bayou country as the setting for this absorbing tale of local culture with a 21st century face.
The action begins when a local deputy sheriff discovers the body of a young girl raped and beaten on the grounds of the South Louisiana Sleep Disorder Institute. The macabre scene reads like something by Edgar Allan Poe an antebellum mansion shrouded in mist rising from surrounding crocodile-infested mangrove swamps and partially obscured by hanging moss. When the victim is identified as a patient, Senior Deputy Mark French locks down the institute and takes a closer look at its fantasy fulfillment program, one that recreates wealthy patients’ dreams and fantasies with enough realism that they are recalled as true experiences by those undergoing the treatment.
French soon establishes that another patient is missing and may have stolen a car. Other suspects include a grotesquely deformed boy and his hardscrabble parents eking out a primitive living on the edge of the swamp, the institute’s sinister director and several members of her staff with violent criminal records. While tracking the missing patient through the steamy swamp, the deputies come across two more sadistically murdered victims whose deaths suggest that a second psychopath may be on the loose. The pace accelerates as French closes in on at least one of the killers. The stormy night scene of the hunters racing through a lightning-laced swamp with flashlights reinforced by a helicopter’s searchlight equals Hollywood’s best. Wilson is even able to weave a thin but appealing romantic thread into the violent tapestry that makes Deep Sleep a memorable reading experience.
John Messer writes from Ludington, Michigan.
n his latest thriller, Deep Sleep, Charles Wilson returns to one of his favorite themes: murder and mayhem triggered by a foreign invasion of the mind. The author of several best-selling scientific thrillers, Wilson has a knack for crafting riveting plot lines around kernels of…
t voyeurism if the voyeur, the watcher, has permission to watch? Television shows like Survivor reel in huge audiences by giving viewers the sense that they have a secret window to the participant’s personal, private moments. But if someone knows they are being watched, in fact, invites the viewing, perhaps the table turns, the exhibitionist holds the cards, and the mesmerized voyeur becomes victim to the exhibitionist. David Ellis uses this seductive cat and mouse game to the hilt in his tautly crafted, provocative first novel, Line of Vision.
The protagonist, Marty Kalish, is a successful investment banker who has been to law school. He knows enough about law, lawyers and police matters to make him either smart enough to get away with murder or too smart for his own good. We’re not sure which. This is because the story is told in first person and while Kalish is devilishly fascinating, he may not be the most reliable source for helping us determine his guilt or innocence. For one thing, he lies.
For another, he seems to have an inability to accept responsibility and achieve fulfilling relationships, even with close family members. (In a sense, he became an unwitting “voyeur” as a child, and a witness to a haunting secret he harbors deep inside.) And finally, he’s an outright Peeping Tom lurking outside Rachel Reindhard’s house in the cold and dark, waiting to see her in the window. “A grown man sneaking outside a married woman’s house. Pathetic. Depraved. Perverted. All of the above?” he asks himself and we are not sure of the answer, having become voyeurs ourselves watching him watch her! Deciding whether Kalish is a hero or a hedonist is part of the intrigue of this novel, and Ellis does a remarkable job of keeping us in suspense on all fronts until the final, riveting pages.
Line of Vision is a legal thriller, complete with lawyer wrangling, questions of evidence and a hair-raising courtroom drama, but it is also a character study in which the mystery of Kalish the man is as spellbinding as the mystery surrounding the murder. An action-packed page-turner, this book will not only make you wonder “who is watching whom?” but force you to question the morality of looking just because there is something titillating to see. Is it sometimes wise, we must ask, to limit our own “line of vision”? Linda Stankard writes from Cookeville, Tennessee.
t voyeurism if the voyeur, the watcher, has permission to watch? Television shows like Survivor reel in huge audiences by giving viewers the sense that they have a secret window to the participant's personal, private moments. But if someone knows they are being watched, in…
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