A knotty, suspenseful, and entertaining whodunit, mixing gritty vibes with keen energy.
In Selbo’s third Dee Rommel mystery, grisly murders reveal a sex-trafficking ring in placid Portland, Maine.
The third installment of Selbo’s Dee Rommel series finds the 20-something private eye and former Portland police officer, who lost half of her left leg in the line of duty, investigating the murder of Hannah Wall, a driver for local ride-hailing app WheelieMaine. The young woman was found with her throat cut in her car, which crashed and burned. Dee is drawn into the case when her assistant, Abshir Jama, asks her help for his friend Yuusuf Farax, a high school senior and fellow Somali immigrant, who witnessed the crash and then had his backpack stolen by a possible perp at the scene. The next morning, he found the word “Silence” spray-painted on his house. Dee calls on her cyber-sleuth friend, Jade, for help; she recognizes Hannah as a volunteer at a teen crisis hotline who was a victim of sex-trafficking. Jade connects Dee with the organization’s director, Nancy Camsion; however, when Dee goes to meet her, she finds Nancy’s apartment door bashed in and Nancy dead in the bathroom with a slashed throat. Yuusuf reluctantly reveals that he knew Hannah personally, and that she’d formed a support group for teens who’d participated in parties where they were offered drugs and money to have sex with anonymous strangers. Along the way, Dee compares notes with Portland police detective and longtime flame Robbie Donato, who urges her to steer clear of Hannah’s case.
Over the course of this mystery, Selbo paints an atmospheric portrait of a lived-in Portland that’s quaint on the outside but rotten on the inside. She populates it with decent people and sharp operators, hardworking immigrants, and local lowlifes redolent of “the smell of beer, pot and unwashed armpits.” Her writing is shrewd, canny, and subtle, and it’s always alive to small gradations of behavior that have serious import: “Part of my job is recognizing lies. There are lots of tells: Slight hesitation. A swallowing of words. False bravado. Not engaging in eye contact. A change in vocal tone. That’s what I’ve just heard.” In Selbo’s evocative, punchy prose, Dee comes across as a compelling and complex hero—one who’s painfully aware of her vulnerabilities but accepts them with hardboiled aplomb: “It’s the slash on her throat…that brings up the bile. My diaphragm convulses, I frantically push myself up—fast—and turn to the wall just as the yellow-ish waste projectiles from my throat and hits the tile. Shit. Now I’ve contaminated the scene.” Dee also ably discovers more puzzle pieces and persons of interest as the investigation proceeds, including Tip Flack, a squirrelly hacker and WheelieMaine’s CEO; Steph Byrne, her high school classmate who runs a high-fashion resale shop that employs troubled teens; and Steph’s slick developer boyfriend, Xavier Toomey, who immediately hits on Dee. Along the way, readers will root for her as she heads gamely toward the truth.
A knotty, suspenseful, and entertaining whodunit, mixing gritty vibes with keen energy.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781950627707
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Pandamoon Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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