Despite the colder weather, this slice of Nordic noir reads surprisingly like top-line American procedurals.
The apparent kidnapping of a schoolboy kicks off a second grim outing for Det. Erik Schäfer and investigative journalist Heloise Kaldan.
Heloise thinks she’s having a really bad day when she goes to see Dr. Jens Bjerre to confirm her in-home pregnancy test and get help securing an abortion. She’s distressed to find that her troubles, serious as they are, are jolted into perspective when she hears Bjerre get a phone call that informs him that his son has gone missing from Copenhagen’s Nyholm School. In fact, it turns out that no one’s seen 10-year-old Lukas Bjerre since his father dropped him off that morning, several precious hours ago, and that he could have been spirited far away in the meantime. A reported sighting of Lukas’ corpse in a frozen moat leads only to the recovery of his jacket, whose bloodstains and traces of rat poison hint at a dark story. Erik and his colleagues in the Violent Crimes Unit work every lead, and they’re both horrified and frustrated when the DNA found in the blood on Lukas’ jacket leads them to a man who was shot to death very shortly after the boy’s disappearance, or maybe even before. As Hancock shows the dragnet widening to include an ever wider array of characters, her story threatens to lose focus. But though it lacks the unforgiving intensity of The Corpse Flower (2021), Erik and Heloise’s memorable debut, it closes the circle with a suitably nightmarish snap.
Despite the colder weather, this slice of Nordic noir reads surprisingly like top-line American procedurals.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63910-117-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A weird, wild ride.
Celebrity scandal and a haunted lake drive the narrative in this bestselling author’s latest serving of subtly ironic suspense.
Sager’s debut, Final Girls (2017), was fun and beautifully crafted. His most recent novels—Home Before Dark (2020) and Survive the Night (2021) —have been fun and a bit rickety. His new novel fits that mold. Narrator Casey Fletcher grew up watching her mother dazzle audiences, and then she became an actor herself. While she never achieves the “America’s sweetheart” status her mother enjoyed, Casey makes a career out of bit parts in movies and on TV and meatier parts onstage. Then the death of her husband sends her into an alcoholic spiral that ends with her getting fired from a Broadway play. When paparazzi document her substance abuse, her mother exiles her to the family retreat in Vermont. Casey has a dry, droll perspective that persists until circumstances overwhelm her, and if you’re getting a Carrie Fisher vibe from Casey Fletcher, that is almost certainly not an accident. Once in Vermont, she passes the time drinking bourbon and watching the former supermodel and the tech mogul who live across the lake through a pair of binoculars. Casey befriends Katherine Royce after rescuing her when she almost drowns and soon concludes that all is not well in Katherine and Tom’s marriage. Then Katherine disappears….It would be unfair to say too much about what happens next, but creepy coincidences start piling up, and eventually, Casey has to face the possibility that maybe some of the eerie legends about Lake Greene might have some truth to them. Sager certainly delivers a lot of twists, and he ventures into what is, for him, new territory. Are there some things that don’t quite add up at the end? Maybe, but asking that question does nothing but spoil a highly entertaining read.
A weird, wild ride.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-18319-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.
A much-beloved author gives a favorite recurring character her own novel.
Holly Gibney made her first appearance in print with a small role in Mr. Mercedes (2014). She played a larger role in The Outsider (2018). And she was the central character in If It Bleeds, a novella in the 2020 collection of the same name. King has said that the character “stole his heart.” Readers adore her, too. One way to look at this book is as several hundred pages of fan service. King offers a lot of callbacks to these earlier works that are undoubtedly a treat for his most loyal devotees. That these easter eggs are meaningless and even befuddling to new readers might make sense in terms of costs and benefits. King isn’t exactly an author desperate to grow his audience; pleasing the people who keep him at the top of the bestseller lists is probably a smart strategy, and this writer achieved the kind of status that whatever he writes is going to be published. Having said all that, it’s possible that even his hardcore fans might find this story a bit slow. There are also issues in terms of style. Much of the language King uses and the cultural references he drops feel a bit creaky. The word slacks occurs with distracting frequency. King uses the phrase keeping it on the down-low in a way that suggests he probably doesn’t understand how this phrase is currently used—and has been used for quite a while. But the biggest problem is that this narrative is framed as a mystery without delivering the pleasures of a mystery. The reader knows who the bad guys are from the start. This can be an effective storytelling device, but in this case, waiting for the private investigator heroine to get to where the reader is at the beginning of the story feels interminable.
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016138
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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