Pulse-pounding terror mixed with romance makes for page-turning pleasure.
Dillon Savich and Lacey Sherlock, Coulter’s famous pair of married FBI agents, take on two cases that have roots buried deep in the past.
After the murder of her parents in Virginia, 12-year-old Allison Rendahl barely escaped by climbing out a window and hiding in a cave. Her Uncle Leo took her back to his home in Australia and raised her to be a strong woman who helped him lead extreme adventures, but her mental scars remain. Now, under the name Kirra Mandarian and after attending law school at the University of Virginia, she's returned to her hometown as a prosecuting attorney, hoping to solve the murder of her parents. Finding a painting by her father, who was an artist, with photos taped to the back gives her the clues she needs, and using the name Eliot Ness, she gathers and sends incriminating information to Agent Dillon Savich. On the other side of the country, 12-year-old piano virtuoso Emma Hunt, who was traumatized at age 6 when she was kidnapped by a troubled priest, becomes the target of another predator. Savich and Sherlock, his partner and wife, were involved in the original case, and the Hunt family is flying to D.C. both to attend Emma’s concert at the Kennedy Center and to get her into a safer environment. Emma’s grandfather, a sophisticated crime boss, could well be the reason Emma is targeted for kidnapping. At any rate, the people involved in both cases are stone-cold killers who will use any means to achieve their goals. Savich and Sherlock must identify those goals or die trying.
Pulse-pounding terror mixed with romance makes for page-turning pleasure.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-300413-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.
Hung out to dry by the elders who betrayed them, a squad of pregnant teens fights back with old magic.
Hendrix has a flair for applying inventive hooks to horror, and this book has a good one, chock-full with shades of V.C. Andrews, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Foxfire, to name a few. Our narrator, Neva Craven, is 15 and pregnant, a fate worse than death in the American South circa 1970. She’s taken by force to Wellwood House in Florida, a secretive home for unwed mothers where she’s given the name Fern. She’ll have the baby secretly and give it up for adoption, whether she likes it or not. Under the thumb of the house’s cruel mistress, Miss Wellwood, and complicit Dr. Vincent, Neva forges cautious alliance with her fellow captives—a new friend, Zinnia; budding revolutionary Rose; and young Holly, raped and impregnated by the very family minister slated to adopt her child. All seems lost until the arrival of a mysterious bookmobile and its librarian, Miss Parcae, who gives the girls an actual book of spells titled How To Be a Groovy Witch. There’s glee in seeing the powerless granted some well-deserved payback, but Hendrix never forgets his sweet spot, lacing the story with body horror and unspeakable cruelties that threaten to overwhelm every little victory. In truth, it’s not the paranormal elements that make this blast from the past so terrifying—although one character evolves into a suitably scary antagonist near the end—but the unspeakable, everyday atrocities leveled at children like these. As the girls lose their babies one by one, they soon devote themselves to secreting away Holly and her child. They get some help late in the game but for the most part they’re on their own, trapped between forces of darkness and society’s merciless judgement.
A pulpy throwback that shines a light on abuses even magic can’t erase.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780593548981
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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