An icy Scandinavian crime novel with plenty going on beneath the surface.
In Sheldon’s debut crime novel, the murder of a controversial billionaire rocks Iceland.
Detective Hekla Rafney Fritzdóttir of Iceland’s National Bureau of Investigation has just caught a particularly sensational case: Someone has slit the throat of American billionaire Jack Drumman at one of the country’s most luxurious spas. It’s Hekla’s first murder investigation, and the first murder Iceland has seen in three years—the fame of the victim means that all eyes will be on her as she tries to figure out what happened. Drumman was the paranoid founder of a surveillance tech company, a line of work that created innumerable enemies. “So the question of who would want to kill Jack was rhetorical—anyone with a conscience would,” thinks Hekla. Police soon zero in on a suspect, however: Security footage shows that Aldís Eva, a radical journalist and particularly vocal critic of Drumman, visited the spa the day of the murder. Aldís has since gone missing, and the search to locate her leads Hekla to August Sorenson, a Danish citizen and former FBI legal attaché in Copenhagen. August is tortured by his past and deeply depressed, but the news that Aldís, who he once knew and deeply respects, is wanted for murder reawakens something in him. When a second billionaire—Iceland’s richest man and an associate of Drumman’s—also winds up dead, it becomes clear there is more to this case than there seems to be. Sheldon’s tight prose hews closely to his characters’ inner monologues, particularly those of the suicidal August, to whom the reader is given more access than the stoic Hekla: “But there was another truth that he could no longer deny—this life wasn’t enough anymore,” he thinks, shortly after their first meeting. “He was less than a half-hour removed from trying to end it with a belt for fuck’s sake. He was sad—miserable—and was clearly getting worse.” The characters’ politics take the plot to unexpected places, and the reader is happy to follow.
An icy Scandinavian crime novel with plenty going on beneath the surface.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9798989981618
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Northern Lights Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Expert, but unsurprising.
The death of an old friend who was more than a friend sends Dr. Kay Scarpetta down her latest rabbit hole.
If every body tells a story, the corpse of 7-year-old Luna Briley sings the blues. On top of the many signs of ongoing physical abuse, there’s the fatal gunshot wound to her head. Ryder and Piper Briley, the wealthy and powerful parents who didn’t call the police until after their daughter died, insist that Luna’s death was an accident, or maybe a suicide. Scarpetta doesn’t think so, and her refusal to release the body to the Brileys’ hand-picked mortician moves them to legal action against her as Virginia’s chief medical examiner. You’d think it would be a relief to put this case aside for another when Scarpetta’s niece, Secret Service agent Lucy Farinelli, calls her and ferries her by helicopter to an abandoned Oz theme park owned by Ryder Briley, but this one’s even more heartbreaking. Scarpetta is there to examine the body of astrophysicist Sal Giordano, her close friend and former lover, who was evidently kidnapped, held in captivity for several hours, and tossed out of an unidentified aircraft. The leading suspects are the Brileys; Carrie Grethen, Lucy’s sociopathic ex-lover, with whom Scarpetta has repeatedly tangled in the past; and the UFO that dumped Giordano’s body without leaving the usual traces for air-traffic technologies to pick up. The multiple rounds of physical examinations Scarpetta conducts on both victims are every bit as meticulous and gripping as fans would expect; the killer’s identity is neither surprising nor interesting, but Cornwell juggles her trademark forensics, and the paranormal hints she’s become increasingly invested in, more dexterously than usual.
Expert, but unsurprising.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781538770382
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK TO SCREEN
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