A well-executed classic mystery to curl up with, featuring an admirably complex hero.
A blizzard and a dead body turn a peaceful retreat into a suspenseful whodunnit in Regan’s mystery novel.
Detective Josie Quinn has been struggling since the death of her beloved colleague Mett. Watching him die was just the latest in a series of traumatic events both on and off the job, and the effects of PTSD are keeping her from focusing or sleeping. To work on her insomnia, Josie signs up for the Sacred New Beginnings Retreat at a remote mountain lodge north of her home in Denton, Pennsylvania. There, the warm and inviting doctor Sandrine Morrow has assembled a small group of six people, each reeling from some traumatic event—harrowing incidents of rape, stalking, murder, and freak accidents have brought them all together. Josie begins to worry that an impending snowstorm will trap them without enough supplies. (“There are worse places to be stuck although the company could be better. Buch of sad sacks, we are,” quips Alice, the wise-cracking New York City nurse with whom Josie quickly bonds.) The lodge’s capable caretaker sets off with the only satellite phone, and the trap for a classic closed-circle mystery is set when one of the retreat participants is soon found dead in the rising snow. Josie does her best to gather what few clues she can, but with wild bears on the prowl, no cell service, and dwindling supplies, the remaining guests have to all work together just to survive, even though they know that one of them is likely a murderer. As therapeutic talk breaks down into tense, violent exchanges, Josie’s husband, Noah, sets out from Denton determined to bring his wife home (and make up for a fight that they had before her departure). While struggling to get through the storm, Noah also stumbles into a dangerous situation stemming from New Beginnings. Both husband and wife will have to face the elements and their inner demons to make it out of this storm alive.
Regan’s setup for this country murder mystery is as classic as it gets, but her clever twist—making each of the possible suspects a victim recovering from trauma—adds a unique layer of emotion to the proceedings. Readers unfamiliar with detective Josie from the other books in Regan’s series will find themselves immediately drawn to her vulnerability—having the book’s earliest scenes depict her sessions with Dr. Morrow is a smart way to dig into the complex protagonist’s psychology before getting into the sleuthing. The lodge storyline becomes a slowly simmering pot of deception and intrigue, while Noah’s parallel adventure punctuates the book with more action-packed thrills—Regan smartly alternates between the two to keep readers turning the pages. The final revelations and motivations feel like they come together a bit too quickly and neatly; the complex psychology driving the first half is eschewed to reveal a much more traditionally evil villain, but Regan still delivers a worthy entry in her series. Readers will be easily drawn in by her smart characters and her snowy mountain setting, both perfectly cozy and creepy.
A well-executed classic mystery to curl up with, featuring an admirably complex hero.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781837909483
Page Count: 338
Publisher: Bookouture
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.
The feds must protect an accused criminal and an orphaned girl.
Maybe you’ve met him before as protagonist of The 6:20 Man (2022): Ex-Army Ranger Travis Devine, who’d had the dubious fortune to tangle with “the girl on the train,” is now assigned by his homeland security boss to protect Danny Glass, who's awaiting trial on multiple RICO charges in Washington state. Devine has what it takes: He “was a closer, snooper, fixer, investigator,” and, when necessary, a killer. These skills are on full display as the deaths of three key witnesses grind justice to a temporary halt. Glass has a 12-year-old niece, Betsy Odom, and each is the other’s only living relative—her parents recently died of an apparent drug overdose. The FBI has temporary guardianship of Betsy, who's a handful. She tells Travis that though she’s not yet 13, she's 28 in “life-shit years.” The financially well-heeled Glass wants to be her legal guardian with an eye to eventual adoption, but what are his real motives? And what happens to her if he's convicted? Meanwhile, Betsy insists that her parents never touched drugs, and she begs Travis to find out how they really died. This becomes part of a mission that oozes danger. The small town of Ricketts has a woman mayor who’s full of charm on the surface, but deeply corrupt and deadly when crossed. She may be linked to a subversive group called "12/24/65," as in 1865, when the Ku Klux Klan beast was born. Blood flows, bombs explode, and people perish, both good guys and not-so-good guys. Readers might ponder why in fiction as well as in life, it sometimes seems necessary for many to die so one may live. And what about the girl on the train? She's not necessary to the plot, but she's a fun addition as she pops in and out of the pages, occasionally leaving notes for Travis. Maybe she still wants him dead.
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781538757901
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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