A well-crafted, goose bump–inducing work of psychological horror.
In Harrison’s latest horror novel, a woman with a history of mental illness is haunted by a crime committed in her new house.
Kathryn Fields has just bought a run-down Victorian town house in Washington, D.C.’s, Georgetown neighborhood in the hopes of fixing it up. Her wealthy mother thinks Kathryn has made a rash decision purchasing the property, which has ties to a 35-year-old murder from 1984. Kathryn, however, hopes the house will anchor her following a psychotic break she experienced several months ago. “The things it must have seen and heard in its hundred plus years,” she thinks on her first night in her new home, “the intrigues and passions that must have seeped into these walls, embalmed beneath successive coats of paint and varnish, recorded in the scars on the flooring, preserved in the smells of its woodwork.” The house contains more than just abstractions, she soon learns; it turns out there’s a secret dressing area with a marble-topped vanity hidden behind the wall of her bedroom. Why would someone do such a thing? Perhaps it has something to do with the antique box Kathryn finds there, containing a torn photograph of a beautiful woman—and a loaded handgun. Soon she’s seeing and hearing things that seem related to the unsolved murder of someone who once lived in the house. But are these things real, or evidence that Kathryn’s psychosis has returned? Harrison is adept at creating a sense of true creepiness, as when Kathryn discovers that someone’s rearranged her possessions and has an unexpected reaction: “All the furniture had been moved. The whole house had been rearranged. And yet as Kathryn stood there stunned and disbelieving, the place looked right. Everything exactly where it should have been in the first place.” Several elements of the story will be familiar to horror fans, since they’re relatively common trappings of the haunted house subgenre. In Harrison’s hands, however, they feel like a fresh homage rather than a rerun. Many readers will find it a perfect book for a spooky late-night read.
A well-crafted, goose bump–inducing work of psychological horror.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781680574234
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Wordfire Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
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
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