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Police Procedural

Review

And There He Kept Her.

by Brian Kenney

Here’s the premise: two teens, a boy and a girl, break into Emmett Burr’s house in search of opiates. The house is remote, set on Sandy Lake in northern Minnesota, and the kids just assume that Emmett, old and immensely obese, will be passed out. But everything that can go wrong, does go wrong. Emmett shoots and kills the boy, while the girl, Jenny, is chained and left in a cell in the basement. It’s clear that she’s just the latest in a series of girls who’ve been locked up, abused, and eventually murdered. Fortunately, Jenny’s mother is quick to notice that her daughter is missing; she calls Sheriff’s Deputy Ben Packard, and the search is on. Ben, who recently moved from Minneapolis, spent his childhood summers on the lake; in fact, he’s related to Jenny. Packard’s search takes him to the dark underbelly of Sandy Lake, where alcoholism and drug abuse and violence and crime rule. Low-key Packard, who has his own secrets—he’s gay and just inching out of the closet—is as compelling and potentially as complex a cop as Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache. This is a remarkable debut—sharp, suspenseful, and emotionally powerful—sure to appeal to readers of Karin Slaughter and Lisa Gardner.

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Review

Darkness Falls

by Henrietta Thornton

A series that just keeps getting better. Kate Marshall and her sidekick, Tristan Harper, have finally gotten their PI agency off the ground, and their first case is a cold one: a mother hires them to investigate the death of her daughter, Joanna Duncan, murdered 12 years ago. Fortunately, they are able to get their hands on the original case files and go about replicating the earlier investigation—to much different results. Joanna was an ambitious, hard-hitting journalist who made some enemies in her career. But as Kate and Harper dig deeper, they’re pulled in surprising directions, including an exploration of the last few decades of the local gay community. Bryndza is an expert at including just the right amount of information about our investigators’ personal lives: Kate continues in recovery, enjoying her relationship with her young adult son, while Tristan is broke, despairing of his single status. As the novel draws to a close, and the many leads come together, we are treated to a denouement as satisfying as it is sorrowful.

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Review

Repentance

by Brian Kenney

It’s 1981 and Inspector Joaquín Alzada has one goal: to keep his head down and avoid trouble. Not so easy when you are a cop in Buenos Aires during a period of extreme political turmoil, with Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo bearing daily witness to the thousands of citizens who have been made disappeared. But when his activist brother Jorge is among the missing, Joaquín has no choice but to use his political chips and try to save his brother. Flip to twenty years later, when Argentina is facing a serious economic crisis, with middle-class citizens going hungry and taking to the streets. Again, Joaquín’s reaction is to lie low—he’s close to retirement, after all—but circumstances won’t allow it. For one thing, the body of a woman is found, dumped near the morgue, while at the same time one of Buenos Aires’s wealthiest women has gone missing. Are they a match? Then, the twenty-something son of Jorge—raised by Joaquín and his wife—joins the protestors. Repentance isn’t so much crime fiction as it is fiction embedded in crime, and Díaz skillfully uses Joaquín’s inner voice—poignant, dryly witty, anxious—to move the narrative along. A powerful first novel that brilliantly illuminates a country, a historical period, and an individual.

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Review

The Cottage

by Brian Kenney

Poor Jan. In her late twenties, she’s lost both her job and her boyfriend at the same time. Pretty much directionless, she rents a remote cottage on the edge of a forest and settles down to start that novel she’s always wanted to write, and to try to sort out her future. All would be wonderful were it not for the tapping on the windows every night, the dog barking at something—or someone?—in the garden, and the continual feeling that she is being observed. Cut away to Ian and Emma, a young couple in the area, who have lost a second child to stillbirth, with both babies born deformed. Although they decide to no longer seek having children biologically, Ian becomes obsessed with trying to understand the cause of their misfortunes. These two narratives really crank up the suspense as Jan seeks to discover the nature of her nocturnal visitors while Ian slowly uncovers disturbing facts about his and Emma’s parentages. Eventually the two story lines converge, making for a super creepy, but satisfying, ending. Kudos to Stone for a thriller that relies on neither violence nor murder and manages to treat a medical condition with compassion, not exploitation. Reading groups will enjoy discussing the many moral dilemmas the novel presents.

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Review

Silent Parade

by Brian Kenney

This big, complex, sprawling, novel—complete with a large cast and plenty of backstory—is perfect for when you need to lose yourself for a few days. At the center of the book is the murder of Saori Namiki, a talented young woman who is about to launch her musical career. Jump three years to the present, when her remains are discovered in the rubble of a burnt-out shanty. Finding her murderer would seem impossible, but a similar death over 20 years ago helps Chief Inspector Kusanagi identify the killer, only to see him released for lack of solid evidence. But if the legal system won’t punish the murderer, Saori’s friends, family, and fiancé are more than willing to step up, and an immensely complex scheme is created to do away with the man. As the story unfolds, we are privy to the same information Kusanagi has, keeping the reader in an ongoing state of anxiety. But the real fun in this book is the return of Detective Galileo, last seen in the first book in the series, The Devotion of Suspect X. Physics professor by day, police consultant by night, Galileo enters near the book’s conclusion to upend everything we have come to believe, creating a new narrative that is oh so very satisfying

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Review

Gone for Good

by Henrietta Thornton

At first it seems some well-worn police procedural tropes will dominate the latest novel by bestselling Schaffhausen (Ellery Hathaway series). Our protagonist, a detective, is determined to find the serial killer that eluded her cop father, while wondering if she’ll ever find love in this relationship-destroying career. But some twists make the author’s turbulent latest different. The detective in question, Annalisa Vega, dated the son of one of the victims as a teen; the connection to her first heartbreak drives Vega to uncover the truth—and sometimes to go too far. Adding intrigue is that one of the killer’s last victims, Grace Harper, is an avid, insightful member of an amateur cold-case investigation club, the Grave Diggers, which at the time of Harper’s death was focusing on her killer. “Grace Notes,” journal entries on her investigative findings, will give readers the feeling of turning the case around in their hands as the narrative shifts back and forth in time and between Harper and Vega’s differing knowledge and motivations. Schaffhausen’s writing brings readers right into shadowy Chicago streets and family secrets from page one. This first in a new series is a must for readers of innovative police procedurals as well as fans of true crime shows.

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Review

The Corpse Flower

by Henrietta Thornton

Although I’m on a break from Scandinavian authors, I tried Hancock’s debut anyway, attracted by the no-girl-in-the-title title and the promise of a journalist sleuth. It was the right decision, as the violent rage that seeps out of Stieg Larsson’s work and its ilk is here mostly transformed into determination with dashes of scathing honesty, friendship, and love. The misogyny is tempered too: the woman journalist who’s investigating a murderer in parallel with the police is middle-aged (refreshing!), sometimes weary, but realistically tough when it counts. The target of her investigation is also refreshing: a woman on the run for the murder she committed years before of a wealthy young man who, as far as investigators can tell, was a stranger to her. Letters from the fugitive mention a rare flower that smells like death; how this connects to her crime and why she’s remorseless are revealed in an understated way that stops short of the bleakness we’ve come to expect from Scandinavian works. Sure to leave readers wanting more from Hancock.

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