Magnificent scene-setting supports a thoughtful and (mostly) thrilling plot.
A newspaper publisher with a secret past tries to solve a local missing person case in Cagin’s novel.
Tom Austin was once known as Ken Hanley. Ken lived in Boston and worked as an up-and-coming journalist with the world at his fingertips. Then Ken blew up his life and moved to Naturita, Colorado, a town known for its past mining of uranium. Now Ken goes by the name Tom and is the owner and editor of the West End Forum. When local mechanic Ray Walker vanishes right before his daughter’s wedding, Tom looks into the case—for the sake of his newspaper and to sate his own curiosity. During his investigation, Tom learns that Ray is actually the illegitimate son of Dick Klein, “the richest man in the entire Four Corners,” whose fortune comes from uranium mining. Later, Sarah Walker—Ray’s wife—informs Tom that Ray may have run away with Anya, a woman who escaped from her abusive and meth-addicted husband. While leads abound for Tom—from Ray’s garage doubling as a meth lab to his possible affair—he is still no closer to solving Ray’s disappearance. Cagin combines the mining history of the region with detailed descriptions of the landscape, bringing the reader directly into an environment in which the natural world is beautiful and what is man-made feels desolate (“the long views of distant blue peaks and rocky red-hued canyons spiked with juniper and pinion…where abandoned cars sat rusting away on some ledge or precipice where they had landed after their driver had crashed them”). While the prose is strong, the story has some minor issues—Tom’s intense commitment to Sarah and involvement with her family feels a bit hurried. Additionally, religious polygamy is introduced almost out of nowhere late in the story, though it proves to be a major plot point. Still, this remains a highly captivating and evocative tale.
Magnificent scene-setting supports a thoughtful and (mostly) thrilling plot.Pub Date: April 11, 2024
ISBN: 9798990109551
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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