CANNIBAL LAKE

Name: CANNIBAL LAKE
Author: Andy Gregg
ISBN: 1-59414-059-6

by Andy Gregg ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2003

For all the corpses and ghosts, Gregg’s first serves up cardboard characters in an underplotted broth that’s terminally...

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A thin debut about a cannibalistic spirit chewing ’em up and spitting ’em out in Wisconsin’s North Woods.

Lovingly raised by his Uncle Roland, Jason Targo is understandably shaken by the news that the world-class anthropologist has gone missing, presumed dead. But for several months he’s had to grieve long distance as he’s parked in a Milwaukee hospital, recuperating from bullet wounds received in his police work. Finally placed on sick leave, he packs up and heads for the remote North Woods cabin on Windigo Pond, so named by Native Americans preyed upon by the windigo, an indigenous ghost as foul-tempered as it is carnivorous. Once arrived, Jason discovers that Uncle Roland’s property has become a bone of contention, with Jason, the heir apparent, as apprentice bone. A sign pinned to a tree by a steel-tipped hunting arrow informs him that he’s trespassing on land that rightfully belongs to the neighboring Buckskin Indian Tribe. A visit from the crackpot but acquisitive leadership of a religious cult, the Wildnerness of Zin (sic), alerts him to the existence of still another claimant. And then munched-on carcasses begin to appear. Are they a get-lost message? Or a case of mood windigo—a gloomy, ill-natured spook acting out some serious discontent?

For all the corpses and ghosts, Gregg’s first serves up cardboard characters in an underplotted broth that’s terminally bland.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003

ISBN: 1-59414-059-6

Page Count: 214

Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003

Categories:

THRILLER

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
FIRE AND BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

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LONG BRIGHT RIVER

by Liz Moore ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 7, 2020

With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.

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A young Philadelphia policewoman searches for her addicted sister on the streets.

The title of Moore’s (The Unseen World, 2016, etc.) fourth novel refers to “a long bright river of departed souls,” the souls of people dead from opioid overdoses in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington. The book opens with a long paragraph that's just a list of names, most of whom don’t have a role in the plot, but the last two entries are key: “Our mother. Our father.” As the novel opens, narrator Mickey Fitzpatrick—a bright but emotionally damaged single mom—is responding with her partner to a call. A dead girl has turned up in an abandoned train yard frequented by junkies. Mickey is terrified that it will be her estranged sister, Kacey, whom she hasn’t seen in a while. The two were raised by their grandmother, a cold, bitter woman who never recovered from the overdose death of the girls' mother. Mickey herself is awkward and tense in all social situations; when she talks about her childhood she mentions watching the other kids from the window, trying to memorize their mannerisms so she could “steal them and use them [her]self.” She is close with no one except her 4-year-old son, Thomas, whom she barely sees because she works so much, leaving him with an unenthusiastic babysitter. Opioid abuse per se is not the focus of the action—the book centers on the search for Kacey. Obsessed with the possibility that her sister will end up dead before she can find her, Mickey breaches protocol and makes a series of impulsive decisions that get her in trouble. The pace is frustratingly slow for most of the book, then picks up with a flurry of revelations and developments toward the end, bringing characters onstage we don’t have enough time to get to know. The narrator of this atmospheric crime novel has every reason to be difficult and guarded, but the reader may find her no easier to bond with than the other characters do.

With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.