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Review

The Innocent One

by Henrietta Thornton

When a child is tried for killing another child and is found not guilty, what’s next? For Sebastian Croll, English law means he’s anonymous and allowed to go on with his life. When he’s wanted for questioning in another killing years later, Daniel Hunter, his solicitor in this case and the earlier one, and the main character here, promises Sebastian that so much time has passed that even the police won’t be able to access records of the previous accusation. Whether they know about that past event or not, the police aren’t dropping their suspicions easily, leading Daniel and readers into the ethical quandary regarding how much a child can be responsible for their actions and how much those past actions should matter if their adult behavior goes off the rails. Ballantyne (The Guilty One, 2022) juxtaposes the paths of two troubled boys’ lives here, with Sebastian’s the more dramatically bad version but Daniel’s own hell—the foster-care system—on display through flashbacks and his current erratic, self-destructive behavior. Can Daniel save himself and his marriage while he fights for a client he can’t believe? Ballantyne’s crisp writing makes getting to the answer a fast, absorbing trip through what happens when self-loathing and love collide.

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Review

Death in Heels

by Brian Kenney

Irish drag queens may not get much sunlight, but they can still throw plenty of shade. Centered on a drag family that performs at the Dublin dive bar TRASH, the novel follows Fiona (Fi) McKinnery and her best friend and roommate Robyn/Mae B as Mae B makes her debut on the TRASH stage, lip-syncing to Julie London. She’s a huge success, until Eve, a nasty little queen, does a parody of Mae B’s act, ruining the night. When, later that evening, Eve is found dead, face down in an overflowing gutter, is anyone surprised? While everyone, from the gay community to the Gardaí (police), is willing to accept the death as an accident, Fi—who discovered the body on her way home from the club—is convinced it’s murder. When she speculates about Eve’s murder on her blog, she draws the ire of the queens who would rather forget about the whole thing and quickly turn their misogyny on Fi, dubbing her “Hagatha Christie.” Unfortunately, ensuing incidents only support Fi’s speculation. A charming novel about growing up and growing apart, the power of family—both your own and the one you create—and the danger of repression.

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Review

The Cloisters

by Brian Kenney

A wonderfully dark novel rich in characterization. After Ann Stillwell graduates from college, she doesn’t waste a minute more in Walla Walla, WA, and heads to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), where she has secured a summer position as curatorial associate. But there’s a mix up, and Ann ends up at the Cloisters, the Met’s museum and garden devoted to medieval art, located at the remote northern tip of Manhattan. Here she ends up working with Rachel Mondray, who is everything Ann isn’t: Yale educated, Harvard bound, immensely wealthy. Will they be friends, enemies, or frenemies? Friends, it turns out, providing they stick to Rachel’s terms. Under the tutelage of Patrick, the curator-in-charge, they research early Renaissance tarot cards in preparation for an upcoming exhibit. But the cards aren’t just visually beguiling. They are powerful in ways that go well beyond art history, capable of inspiring evil today. Hays does a wonderful job of opening up the lives of both Ann and Rachel, who forge an alliance—like the contestants in a Survivor-like TV show—that will see them safely through the summer. Or will it? Fans of Shapiro’s The Art Forger, Perez-Reverte’s The Flanders Panel and Santlofer’s The Last Mona Lisa will love this book.

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Review

The Local

by Henrietta Thornton

Hartstone’s debut draws on the real-life town of Marshall, Texas: a quarter of all patent cases in the country are heard there. In the 1990s, Judge T. John Ward made his courtroom in the Eastern District of Texas, or EDTX, a kind of patent-trial machine, using timers when lawyers spoke and limiting the number of pages they could file. In addition, Marshall’s juries award unusually high amounts in damages, all making EDTX attractive to those suing for patent infringement. Judge Ward is called Gardner here, but the practices are the same. Appearing in his court is Amir Zawar, whose rideshare app may have stolen another product’s design. Representing Zawar is James Euchre, a lawyer who tells himself he’s quit smoking…he only has a few per day, after all…and is trying to limit himself to three drinks a day. His resolve is tested when his client is, shall we say, reluctant to go along with court decorum. It’s not a great idea to hit your lawyer and threaten the judge’s life, but it’s even worse when the judge is later found dead. Euchre has never worked on a criminal case before, let alone one that could involve the death penalty, but Zawar insists he stay in the lead counsel seat, with both characters, along with Euchre’s love-interest coworker in the trial, taking readers on a tension-filled ride to justice. Lawyers, such as one Mr. Grisham, have long written compelling legal thrillers; this book, by an experienced TV writer, stacks up favorably against the legal greats.

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Review

We Knew All Along

by Henrietta Thornton

Jewelann Jordan attends her high-school reunion to nonchalantly run into her former, sort-of-boyfriend, Christian Campbell, and dump him later that night as revenge for his behavior when they were teens. Christian, who reveals that he’s now a surgeon, and who takes more than one reunion attendee back to his hotel room, doesn’t take well to rejection. A few days later, Jewelann’s controlling husband, Ken, announces that he’s renting out their carriage house, has already found a tenant, and by the way he’s here already. You can guess who it is. Thus begins a fraught game. Jewelann believes Ken’s business trips are covering an affair, but she’s scared to confront him. And what if he knows about what Jewelann and Christian used to get up to in that carriage house, activities that Christian wants to continue and is threatening to reveal? The maelstrom of emotions and abuse boils over in the most shocking way, and readers will not be ready for the whoa-that’s-way-out-there ending. Hardy is a pseudonym for author Megan Hart, whose just released Coming Up for Air also opens with reunion shenanigans.[‘

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Review

Are You Sara?

by Brian Kenney

A complex tale centered around law student Saraswati “Sara” Bhaduri, who’s struggling financially to put herself through law school. One of her side gigs is bartending at a dive bar, which is how she meets up with Sarah Ellis, who’s passed out in the women’s room one closing time. Oddly, they hit it off as they wait for their Ubers, which arrive at the same time. Sara jumps in and in seconds is asleep—only to wake up miles from home in the rich part of town. There’s only one explanation: they mixed up their cars. When she makes it home, it’s to find her building a crime scene and Sarah dead. Is Sara in some way responsible? Sara’s guilt may seem odd at first, but as the novel expands—and we learn more about her life—the pieces start to fall into place. It’s fun to see Sara take even greater charge of her life as she fights to learn what happened to Sarah and what might be her own fate. A fresh and powerful new voice, this is a crime writer to watch.

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Review

Red Queen

by Henrietta Thornton

Hyped as sweeping bestseller lists in Europe, and for good reason, this has all the velocity and thrills of Stieg Larson’s Millennium series but none of the eyeroll-inducing misogyny. “Antonia Scott allows herself to think of suicide no more than three minutes per day,” opens the book. She believes her life to be destroyed as her husband has been in a coma for years. Jon Gutiérrez is the latest disgraced Madrid cop forced by a mysterious character, who calls himself Mentor, to try to get Antonia back on the force. Jon’s between police partners, having left “the Cristiano Ronaldo of Scrabble,” his previous partner, at his last job. He doesn’t have a boyfriend at the moment either. That’s lucky, because it takes all his wiles to deal with Antonia, a woman who’s been trained to have superhuman recall and powers of deduction. She returns to work, and her odd-couple partnership with Jon is pitted against the sinister kidnapper of one of the richest women in Spain, who has left what may be religious symbolism at crime scenes and who drags the partners into some incredibly tense situations (and has an out-of-the-blue twist in store). Word lovers will relish Antonia’s asides that spring from her hobby of collecting expressive words, such as the Inuit Ajunsuaqq, which means to bite a fish and get a mouthful of ash, and the Wagiman murr-ma, searching for an object in the water with your feet. It’s all engrossing, and best of all, this is the first in a trilogy.

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Review

Confidence

by Brian Kenney

Meet the confidence man (or woman), also known as the scammer, the grifter, the swindler. He’s long been a part of our national identity. Don’t believe me? Go back 175 years and take a peep at Melville’s last novel, Confidence-Man. Here, Frumkin updates our national passion—American dream, by any means!—in an epic tale of betrayal, at once gloriously hilarious and heartbreakingly sad. Ezra and Orson meet up one summer as teens at Last Chance Camp, the final stop before juvenile detention. They become lovers of sorts, with homely Ezra in love and gorgeous Orson in like. They’re equally poor, already petty criminals as well as small-time dope dealers. This is a clear case in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, because Ezra and Orson don’t just succeed at digging their way out of poverty. In ten years, they propel themselves into absolutely incredible wealth all through lying, scheming, and cheating. It’s a delight to watch. Eventually, they reach a sort of zenith with NuLife, a kind of wellness practice involving magnets—sort of a cross between L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics and Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop. This fast-paced, wonderfully unique novel holds a mirror up to American culture and asks all the right questions. It’s the answers that are so disturbing.

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Review

Because I Could Not Stop for Death

by Brian Kenney

From Sir Francis Bacon and Eleanor Roosevelt to Walt Whitman and Queen Elizabeth, famous people often make excellent amateur detectives. This volume introduces Emily Dickinson as sleuth. Enigmatic and reclusive, an iconoclast and a feminist, Emily lived in America during a time of enormous change and unrest. One of this country’s greatest poets, Emily has fascinated generations—and Flower does a wonderful job of introducing the 25-year-old Emily, years before she withdraws from most social contact. Here we enter Emily’s world through her family’s new maid, Willa Noble, who soon strikes up a cautious friendship with the unusual Emily. When Willa’s brother Henry is killed in the town stables, Willa turns to her new friend for solace, and eventually help. She believes that Henry was murdered, and Emily is quick to join the investigation as the two are drawn out of women’s traditional spheres and into the dark underbelly of Amherst. The book is rife with references to class and race, abolition and the Underground Railroad, yet the author manages to avoid tropes such as that of the white savior. Flower is an accomplished mystery author who moves the story along at a perfect pace while immersing us in the complexities of Emily and her time. A gem for historical-mystery fans.

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Review

The Storyteller’s Death

by Henrietta Thornton

Fraught connections between different worlds hold together this coming-of-age tale: connections between Puerto Rican families in the United States and their homeland; between the past and the present; between the real world and one made of stories. As the book opens, its shy protagonist, Isla Larsen Sanchez, is visiting her mother’s native Puerto Rico. Back in New Jersey, “everyone [looks] so colorless, like the underbelly of a fish,” but at least there she can do her own thing. The island, however, is overflowing with color but also with cheek-pinching aunts who expect proper behavior from a young lady with “not one drop of blood…that is not European.” Over the years, as she spends every summer in Puerto Rico, Isla comes to realize that her oh-so-pure blood may have given her…well, she’s not so sure it’s a gift. She sees visions of tales the cuentistas, storytelling women in her family, have told her—but only after their deaths. When one story involves a murder, and Isla finds that she can be physically hurt by weapons in the visions, readers find themselves dropped into a combination of magical realism, terror, and mystery, all wrapped in a shroud of family secrets and dubious honor. This rich story about stories can work as a crossunder, meaning it can be enjoyed by young adults as well as adult readers; Toni Morrison fans will particularly enjoy the otherworld-tinged drama

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