Deeply unsettling yet compulsively readable.
A horrific real-life quintuple murder in a sleepy French village inspired this novel.
What would it take to provoke extreme savagery in a seemingly normal person? This is the question Anna Guillot explores after her husband, Constant, kills five members of the Langlois family—Bakary, Sylvia, and their three children—in a fit of extreme rage. For a long time, the residents of the placid French village of Carmac haven't felt any real threats. They watched the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris at a remove, through televised media coverage. All that changes when Bakary Langlois arrives with his family. Not only is Bakary Black, he is also rich, a markedly different social class than most other Carmac residents. His custom-built chalet is a source of envy, especially for Constant, his neighbor. Anna narrates two stories: One looks back at her husband’s early days as a promising pole vaulter whose athletic dreams are crushed by a nasty accident while the other details the systematic resentment that builds in an already fractured Constant, whose perceived indignities are compounded when Anna finds work as a maid at the Langlois chalet. Then the cauldron of simmering resentment boils over when Bakary swindles Constant out of his parents’ life savings: 8,000 euros. In her first novel to be translated into English, Sedira packs a powerful punch, exploring the class-race divide through Constant, Anna, and the rest of the town’s residents. The graphic murders stand in stark contrast to Sedira's subtle accounting of Constant’s tortured path. At the center of the tragedy is complicity: Constant is never made to realize that a bad hand might be crippling but not reason enough to take it out on the perceived “other.”
Deeply unsettling yet compulsively readable.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-14-313627-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.
The eternal jostling for power in Rome and the Vatican is juiced by a development that attracts the attention of the Magellan Billet and its foremost alumnus, Cotton Malone.
Eric Gaetano Casaburi, secretary of Italy’s National Freedom Party, anticipates a decisive victory for the party if Sergio Cardinal Ascolani, the Vatican’s secretary of state, will lend his full-throated support. Of course, the Church isn’t supposed to meddle in contemporary politics, but Eric makes an offer he doesn’t think Ascolani can refuse. Five hundred years ago, Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici loaned Pope Julius II ten million florins the Church never repaid. That debt is still legally payable to anyone who proves to be a surviving member of the Medici family, and Eric believes he can prove exactly that. Although Malone, called in to investigate the bona fides of Ascolani’s enemy Jason Cardinal Richter, has already found a fortune hidden in Richter’s apartment, Richter swears that he’s being framed, and the violent deaths of three anonymous functionaries seem to bear him out. So, Malone forges a series of alliances with Richter, with wealthy businesswoman Camilla Baines, and ultimately with an even more surprising party to prevent Ascolani and Thomas Dewberry, a hired assassin who’s both a sociopath and a devout Catholic, from swaying the upcoming election in return for Eric’s forgiving the ancient debt. An extended closing note shows how inventively Berry mingled history and fiction to weave this tangled web. Readers invested in learning more about the Medicis can be assured that the brief glimpse of them in a prologue set in 1512 is only the beginning.
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538770566
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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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