Reviews and Comments

There's something bad happening on Hemlock Lane, a dismal strip of seedy businesses in Rock Harbor, Maine. It's where you go if you want to buy meth or sex. It might also be where someone is abducting girls, young women like Grace, suffering from trauma after escaping from captivity but without her captor found, or like two other girls who have been found dead.returnreturnNow Grace is guarding her privacy at a country inn, all but closed for the winter, avoiding news and all human connections except for the owner of a local grocery who makes deliveries. She reluctantly lets a room to Aden, whose elderly father has gone missing – possibly just off on an impromptu fishing trip, but Aden's mother is worried. As he begins his search, he crosses the path of Kira, whose daughter, like Grace and the two murdered girls, has gone off the radar. Kira is frantically, doggedly, pursuing every lead while Aden gradually wakes up to the realization that the comforting stories he's telling himself about his dad's fate are less and less likely. Then another man, the same age as his father, is found dead, murdered with the same method as the girls.returnreturnWe learn their stories in separate chapters, loosely connected but growing more tightly braided together as time goes on, with a few brief but chilling passages from the perspective of Kira's captive daughter, trapped somewhere unknown. Both Aden and Kira learn things about the loved ones they are searching for that call all of their certainties into question, and Grace begins to find it increasingly difficult to maintain her shell of isolation from the world.returnreturnWith the focus tightly on these three characters, the pieces of the puzzle begin to come together, the emphasis on their efforts, with the police investigation so far at the periphery it's nearly irrelevant. While the trope of girls held in captivity by depraved monsters is a tired cliché, Glass does a good job of developing characters, balancing the quotidian details that make them come alive with ratcheted-up pacing that pushes the story forward in proper beach thriller fashion, leaving readers with a dramatic finish and a moral quandary to wrestle with at the end. returnreturnReposted from Reviewing the Evidence

In a followup to the wonderful CLARK AND DIVISION, Hirahara builds a mystery around the situation the characters find themselves in after World War II has ended and the Japanese-Americans who had been herded into internment camps were turned loose in a world where the discrimination they had faced still existed and the homes, businesses, and lives that had been torn from them were not restored. This is a less familiar part of the Japanese-American experience than the camps for most Americans, so learning about it through this thoroughly-researched historical fiction is eye-opening. returnreturnReturning from Chicago to Los Angeles has been tough for Aki and her family. Though she has been finally reunited with her husband after his wartime experiences in Europe, marriage is proving to be surprisingly challenging, with her husband suffering from nightmares most nights, and her father is bent on recovering his business in the flower market even though the prospects are dim. Struggling to find a place to live, they finally are able to take the place of a Jewish man who is moving out, giving them a modest foothold in a mixed neighborhood near the Japanese community hospital where Aki works, and her husband finds a job at a newspaper, satisfying work for him though the pay is low. returnreturnWhen an elderly man is admitted to Aki's hospital, she notices he is badly bruised, and she finds out he's the father of Babe Watanabe, her husband's friend and the best man at their wedding. She never warmed to Babe, and now it seems he has brutally abused his father. Then, as plots do, it thickens, and shady characters show up to Aki's door looking for Babe. Aki has to figure out what is going on, and in the process we get a tour of the neighborhoods that went through abrupt demographic changes during and after the war, including a vivid depiction of Bronzeville (when Blacks from the South temporarily occupied the neighborhood once home to Japanese Americans) and the Winona trailer camp, a notoriously grim temporary housing camp for people who lost everything, were incarcerated, and have been thrust back into life with little that could be called a home. returnreturnThe afterword provides an encyclopedic tour of resources that informed Hirahara's fictional world, a seminar's worth of knowledge. The beauty of the book is that all of it is conveyed through the story without the author ever resorting to infodumps or the kind of stilted dialogue that is only there to provide historical context. It's very well done. I look forward the next installment in the series, knowing I will learn a lot while swept up in a story.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this historical mystery, the second in the Bridgid Reardon series after THE STREEL Inspired by the lives of the author's immigrant ancestors, this engaging story features a very young but highly independent young Irishwoman who has traveled with a male friend to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where the "big sugars" are the wealthy cattlemen who call the shots - and covet the land being parceled out to newly-arrived settlers like Brigid. returnreturnAs the story opens, Brigid finds a terrible sight - her neighbor, a woman, has been hanged from a cottonwood tree. Who is responsible, and why was the woman targeted? Brigid aims to find out, even as she looks for her missing brother and tries to reconcile herself to life in a "soddy" with a man who she might eventually marry. The ending leaves room for another adventure in another part of the West. returnreturnThough it's the second in the series, it's not necessary to read the first - though you might want to, given the inevitable spoilers in this story. It's a short, engaging, and well-researched, though the author never bogs the story down with too much material. Recommended for mystery lovers, including young adult ones.

Philip Taiwo, a psychologist trained in America who has moved back to Nigeria with his family, is urged by his religious sister to look into a missing persons case - the wife of a megachurch leader has vanished, but nobody seems all that worried about her. Before long, though, it becomes clear there's more going on with the church, which has vast influence, than is on the surface. The case blows up when the police get involved, eager to make a mark whether or not their accusations have merit.returnreturnInterspersed in the story are fairly cryptic messages from ... someone, it's not at all clear at first who. As that threat unravels, the psychologically complex nature of the story becomes clear, though I'm not sure the characters' motivations were ever entirely clear to me. The final scenes seem a little over the top. returnreturnBut the view into fundamentalist Christianity in Nigeria and the celebrity megachurch cults that sprout out of it, complete with sinister controlling behavior and patriarchal beliefs, was interesting as is the lively voice of the narrator and his multi-talented if somewhat conveniently skilled sidekick, a common trope in the genre.

A government that's hostile to MI5 and plans to sell off bits of it to private interests sets up a review panel to investigate misdeeds of the intelligence service, but the wily First Desk contrives a way to keep all sensitive documents from the committee - until someone slips a file into the shopping basket of one of its members and suddenly the committee has work to do - just as it's being disbanded. returnreturnBut let me back up. The novel open with a man's peaceful rural retreat is invaded by some enthusiastic but ham-handed abductors. He manages to escape (and he has a carefully prepared escape plan ready to go) but we don't really learn who he is and why he's under attack for quite some time. returnreturnAfter that action-packed opening, readers spend a bit of time in the doldrums with the committee that has been set up to fail, until the file is discovered and a witness is called, taking us back to Berlin not long after the wall came down. Which is when some weirdly familiar characters begin to assemble... returnreturnI imagine this novel could be read by anyone, but its pleasures really belong to those who have been reading the Slough House series, or at least have seen the television version (which is quite good and faithful to the books) because ... well, I can't say without spoilers. But it's another smart espionage novel with a wicked sense of the absurd that is Mick Herron's hallmark.

Well, that was quite a ride. Once again, Stacey Abrams has concocted a complex plot that hinges on her knowledge of D.C. politics and administration and on her highly-skilled heroine who manages to connect dots and pull random facts together. returnreturnIt opens with a confusing scenario, with a president who has been pushed out but is wheedling his way back into office to face impeachment and, soon enough, a reelection campaign. At the same time, a woman in South Africa is plotting something, with highly-developed technology to use for her ends. Avery is in trouble, too, with her boss, a supreme court justice, still in a coma and only the chief justice keeping her employed while controversy rages around her. It's a lot, and that's before the real plot starts. returnreturnWhile I enjoyed the book, it does require both the patience to keep the threads straight and an ability to suspend disbelief. The characters are all a bit larger than life and the plot is convoluted. It's something those who love a plot-driven thrill ride would enjoy, while those who are more attracted to character development and graceful writing may find it a bit lacking.

A woman who grew up in a small town dominated by a fundamentalist church escapes to the big city (or cities, in this case: it's Minnesota, where the big city has a twin) but returns when a man she once loved dies. She's worried about being drawn back into the cult, but she's convinced the death didn't happen the way the church says, so she stays to solve the mystery. returnreturnThere were things to like about this novel - Del has a realistically hardscrabble life, as do so many people who have school debt and few prospects, a nice change from protagonists who seem magically free of money concerns - but I found it hard to quite fix who Del really was, given she sometimes seemed like the classic small town amateur sleuth but at other times was in a thriller. Nothing wrong with mixing sub-genres, but for me her character didn't totally hang together. The social setting - a small town with a big church that runs everything, including law enforcement and main street business - was a real stretch for me. I probably would have bought it if it were in another state - Arkansas or Idaho, maybe - but I live in Minnesota and it just didn't feel like Minnesota. returnreturnWhile I found it very readable, I found it hard to believe wholeheartedly in the characters and the setting, which brought it down a notch.

What an interesting story - a noir tale but with a contemporary suburban setting. An unpopular high school girl becomes notorious when she falls ill at the prom and goes back to her hotel room where she gives birth alone after her date goes out partying. The baby didn't survive, and after a spate of headlines the two teens go on with their lives. Years later, their paths intersect again, with complicated consequences. returnreturnWhile none of the characters is terribly likeable, they are weirdly compelling even as the ... prom dad? ... in middle age digs himself deeper and deeper into a hole, yet remains certain everything will turn out fine because he's the kind of privileged male who never has to pay for any of his mistakes. In a sense, that's the main driver of the tension in the book. How far can he go out on a limb before it comes crashing down? returnreturnWhile it has the logic of noir, it's very much a novel of the present moment, pandemic and all.

What can you expect from a Peter May novel? A rugged Scottish landscape, a dour detective with a troubled past, a plot that uses tangled family relationships to drive a pacey mystery, and epically bad weather. A WINTER GRAVE ticks all the boxes, and adds one that is unexpected: The story takes place in 2051, after the climate catastrophe, ignored for too long, has altered the landscape, inundating large parts of now-independent Scotland where water taxis ply the streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow and it never seems to stop raining.returnreturnDetective Cameron Brodie is in a very dark mood. Not only has he been humiliated on the stand, when a sophisticated deepfake video contradicted CCTV footage critical to a case, he's just been told by his doctor that he has advanced cancer. He has only six months to live. When a case comes up that requires a trip to a remote western village, he decides to volunteer. As an avid hillclimber he has scaled most of Scotland's mountains, including the one where a missing investigative journalist's body has been discovered. More importantly, taking this assignment will give him a chance to try, once more, to reconcile with his daughter, a climate activist who discovered the reporter's frozen body in an ice cave when visiting a mountaintop weather station. She has long blamed Brodie for her mother's suicide, and he has things he wants to tell her before he dies.returnreturnBrodie needs to find out why the journalist was nosing around the massive nuclear plant located near the village and how he ended up frozen in the ice on a nearby mountain. Soon strange events add to the mystery: the recovered body vanishes from the hotel cooler where it's been stored, and that's just the start, requiring every ounce of Brodie's strength. His physical endurance is, at times, a bit superhuman, but his adventures give readers a bracing perspective as the tension ratchets up. More bodies will fall before the case is solved, and Brodie himself will confront death on a tighter schedule than his six-month prognosis.returnreturnThis fast-paced mystery starts out dark and gloomy, but picks up energy as Brodie heads west, through wild weather, to the kind of setting that May has made his signature. The rugged and challenging landscape is used to good effect, balancing futuristic elements with the enduring power of the natural world. Those familiar with the streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh will likely find the fast-forward fascinating (and disturbing) as May overlays a familiar map with sea-rise predictions, but apart from occasional explanations of how the world has changed, this is no dystopian tract; it's rather a conventional thriller embedded in an unusual and thought-provoking setting. returnreturnReposted from Reviewing the Evidence

It's a bit bittersweet to read this book, knowing it's most likely the last entry. But it's a strong one. The greatest mystery driving much of the story: what is the connection between the first-person entries from 1980 about a university student's murder and the discovery in 2019 of the skeleton of someone who died much more recently, found by archeologists in a farm field where a new highway is going in. The two story lines, one related by the murdered student's former boyfriend during the fraught era when the Yorkshire Ripper was at work and the other a third person account of the current investigation, seem to have nothing in common. But surely they must, and by the end of the novel we know how they are parts of the same story. returnreturnI enjoyed this novel quite a lot. The investigation is satisfyingly and realistically complex (whose skeleton is it? when did he die? basic questions that are difficult to answer as the case gets underway). The past murder has its own questions, but they're being asked by a young man who can't get any information from the cops. There's the moody setting of a community living in fear as a vicious serial killer goes undetected for years, the political involvement of a leftist activist at a time when the IRA was setting off bombs the Bader Meinhoff gang was seeking revolution through violence, and ultimately a government inquiry into police misconduct by Special Branch undercover units during the period. And then there's an occasional subtle nod toward contemporary politics in the UK, with even an old Tory friend of Banks's disgusted with BJ's antics. It all comes together in the end, when one of the characters says "Let me start at the beginning..." Too bad it's actually the end.

In the latest of this strong historical series, Perveen Mistry witnesses a an accident as a child is accidentally burned at a gathering raising funds for a women's hospital. Though his ayah is also injured badly, trying to protect the boy, she is treated poorly by the boy's wealthy family. Worse yet, she is arrested and charged with abortion after taking an herbal potion provided by the housekeeper. Though Perveen, as a rare woman lawyer in 1920s India, doesn't take criminal cases, she can't help but try to aid the woman, who swears she wasn't pregnant and is falsely charged. Meanwhile, things are difficulty at home for Perveen. Her lawyer father isn't happy about the firm taking on a case that isn't in their usual line of work, and her sister-in-law has moved in with her colicky infant and is suffering from post-partum depression. Perveen is perplexed by her sister-in-law's change in personality and doesn't like having her sleep interrupted by a wailing child, but the real problem is that she's unable to have a happy marriage and a child of her own thanks to a disastrous failed union of her own (described in the first book in the series). returnreturnI love this series. The historical setting is fascinating, and the protagonist is an intriguing person. You can't help but learn a lot - about the Parsi community, colonial tensions, gender relationships, the law, and - in this case - the status of low-caste women and the struggle to provide women's health. There's a lot going on, but the plot never trips over itself. Here Perveen is allowed to be less than perfect, which is an interesting development. Altogether, a strong entry in a strong series.

When a divorced Botany professor with a traumatic past attends her daughter's move-in day at college with her ex and his new wife, a sniper interrupts the proceedings and, thanks to her quick thinking, she's able to shield her daughter, who is wounded but not killed - unlike the ex's new wife and another bystander. Clearly the shooting wasn't random - and she can't help but try to find out what happened. In alternate chapters, we meet a principled assassin whose husband was responsible for the shooting, hired by a rich man - and who apparently didn't kill the right person, so is in big trouble. Ren, the assassin, who is a sort of botanist herself, with poison her preferred weapon, is pregnant and becomes suspicious of her husband, who not only was hasty and unprepared when he took the job but isn't adhering to her strict moral code, to only kill people who deserve it. returnreturnThe writing is strong, the execution is sure-footed, and that and a couple of the characters' development, carried me to the end, even though the high-concept plot seemed both too clever and too preposterous. I'm also not fond of stories that depend on killers with a moral code who we're supposed to admire. Mixed feelings about this one.

A hyper-vigilant recluse living in rural England in post-War England gradually gets to know the couple with a small child living nearby and can't help but become protective when the man's criminal family members threaten them to induce him to participate in a job he has refused. It's clear she's highly competent and quite capable of violence if necessary - and as the conflict plays out, we learn about her past. As a child in Belgium she aided the British during World War I and, after moving to England and studying languages, she again joins the war effort, aiding resistance fighters. Now she finds ways to infiltrate the criminal family in London while planning ways to protect her peace-loving neighbors. returnreturnThe historical immersion is brilliantly done in all of the time frames involved, and our protagonist is a fascinating character - prickly, strong, intelligent, aloof, and tortured by something she'd had to do in the war. Other characters are also wonderfully developed, including a woman in the crime family who is overlooked but smarter than she's given credit for. The plot is woven together effectively, and the past is vividly evoked. Altogether, this is an immersive, intelligent, and compelling novel. Immensely enjoyable.