Review by New York Times Review
MICHAEL KORYTA is a fearless stylist who has put his hand to ghost stories, historical novels, killer-thrillers, revenge tragedies, morality tales and detective stories. He's now swinging from the high wire with THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD (Little, Brown, $26), a heart-thumping backwoods adventure that sends two creatively sadistic killers into Montana's Beartooth Mountains, where they spark a monster forest fire to flush out the only witness to their crimes: Jace Wilson, a 14-year-old boy. Jace was just trying to escape his reputation as class coward when he dived into a quarry near his Indiana home. But when he swam into a dead man - and spotted the killers flinging a second victim into the water - Jace knew he was going to die. Reborn with a new name, he finds himself among the "bad kids" in a grueling wilderness survival course, parked there when his parents couldn't be persuaded to put him in a traditional witness protection program. Jace's hunters, the Blackwell brothers, are heartless sociopaths whose professional detachment is etched in their unnervingly precise grammar and careful diction. ("The way they say things. Like they're alone in the world. Like it was built for the two of them and they're lords over it.") There will be no mercy from that quarter. Koryta rigs his tripwire plot with all sorts of unpredictable characters and unforeseen events, including a "flint-and-steel" electrical storm that will make your hair stand on end. There are any number of hunting parties combing the burning woods for Jace, from the Black-well brothers to two determined women riding an injured horse. But sitting here, heart in mouth, it sure looks as if that raging forest fire will outrun them all. IS THERE ANYTHING more unnerving than the realization that you can't trust your own mother? Maybe the realization that you can't trust your father either. That's the killer premise Of THE FARM (Grand Central, $26), a psychological thriller by Tom Rob Smith that draws on the universal fear of losing a parent. The narrator of this split-focus story is a young man named Daniel who lives in London and hasn't been in close touch with his parents since they retired to a farm in rural Sweden. Then one day he gets a frantic phone call from his father, who tells him that his mother has had a psychotic break and is in an asylum. But before Daniel can head for Sweden, his mother arrives with a wild tale of being terrorized by his father and the rich owner of a neighboring farm. Smith's atmospheric narrative draws on fearsome local legends about trolls with "shrapnel teeth" and "bellies like boulders," but as Daniel discovers, the "iron nights" of winter in rural Sweden can drive a stranger a little crazy. IN SUSPENSE FICTION, walking into danger is usually women's work. Joseph Finder flips that convention in SUSPICION (Dutton, $27.95) when a writer named Danny Goodman, a widower who's going nowhere on a biography of Jay Gould, gets into hot water by accepting a $50,000 loan to keep his daughter, Abby, in her pricey private school. The loan comes from Tom Galvin, the indecently rich father of Abby's best friend, and soon after the check clears, two D.E.A. agents strong-arm Danny into spying on Galvin, who's reputedly acting as a financier for a Mexican drug cartel. Finder sets a stiff pace for the escalating crises that keep Danny both in thrall to his handlers and in a state of high anxiety. As he gets to know Galvin, and even considers him a friend, he finds himself wondering what, exactly, makes Galvin any different from a 19th-century robber baron like Jay Gould. SOME PEOPLE CAN'T get enough of Jack the Ripper, and for that clique there's Alex Grecian, who takes an obsessive interest in Saucy Jack in his historical potboilers. "He was deathless," we're told in THE DEVIL'S WORKSHOP (Putnam, $26.95), in which a freakish jail break allows the monster to escape from his cell at Bridewell Prison and embark on another murderous rampage. Detective Inspector Walter Day and other members of Scotland Yard's elite Murder Squad are on hand for the blood bath, as is Dr. Bernard Kingsley, whose work in the new field of forensic science lent historical authenticity to the series's previous novels. Unfortunately, scientific investigation doesn't figure much in this narrative, which is firmly fixated on the savagery of Jack's deeds. SOMEONE IS WATCHING you, but no one is there. Charlotte Link plays on that primal fear in her psychological suspense story, THE WATCHER (Pegasus Crime, $25.95), when an attentive killer goes to work on single women so socially alienated that their bodies can lie undiscovered for days. "What they have in common is their loneliness," one of the Scotland Yard detectives remarks. More mystifying is what the victims have in common with Gillian Ward, who lives with a husband, a 12-year-old daughter and a black cat named Chuck. Unless it happens to be Samson Segal, the neighbor who's stalking the family because they reside in "the world he had always dreamed of." The cool precision of Link's narrative voice (translated from German by Stefan Tobler) makes it clear why this kind of adulation is so chilling.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 29, 2014]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. Smith's startlingly original new novel is told from the perspective of Daniel, a Londoner whose parents, Chris and Tilde, have retired to a farm in the south of Sweden. The story begins as Daniel receives word from his father that his mother has been hospitalized after experiencing psychotic episodes. For months, Chris says, Tilde has been "imagining things-terrible, terrible things." Before Daniel can fly to Sweden to see her, his father calls again to say that Tilde has checked out of the hospital and disappeared. Soon after, she arrives at Daniel's door, emaciated and in obvious distress, claiming to have escaped from an asylum where Chris imprisoned her. In her ensuing tale, strikingly enacted by Toren, Tilde describes her nightmarish life on the farm, with Chris and a neighbor plotting against her. Langton convincingly renders Daniel with the voice of an educated, thoughtful young man, unable to decide whether his mother is telling the truth, or is delusional, as his father claims. Daniel, uncertain and perplexed, interrupts Tilde's story with questions that he hopes will bring out the truth. The conversation continues for much of the novel, with Toren contributing an unnerving, emotionally charged performance, and Langton reacting with questions that seemingly suggest an open mind on the part of Daniel, but that carry more than a hint of disbelief. Together, they transform Smith's brilliant prose into a mesmerizing two-character theatrical. A Grand Central hardcover. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In Smith's (Child 44) latest, Daniel is left troubled and confused by two phone calls, a frantic one from his father followed shortly after by one from his mother. His father says Daniel's mother is mentally ill and has been committed to an asylum in the Swedish town to which they recently moved. While Daniel makes plans to leave London, his mother asks him to pick her up at Heathrow Airport, claiming she needs to talk to the police. From this point the story primarily becomes his mother's as she methodically relates the events that led her to believe the questionable behavior of her neighbors may be widespread and criminal. Two readers enhance the text; James Langton narrates Daniel and his father with understated urgency, and Suzanne Toren does a believable, breathless reading of Daniel's distraught mother. Verdict Readers who enjoy tales of family secrets hidden behind placid façades by such authors as Pat Conroy will appreciate this work. ["A worthy addition to the growing canon of Scandinavian crime thrillers," read the review of the Grand Central hc, LJ 6/1/14.]-Deb West, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Mama's gone crazy, daddy's gone crazy, and Smith (Child 44, 2008) has skipped over from Stalin's Russia to the idyllic Swedish countryside for his latest thriller.The change of scene puts Smith squarely atop territory claimed by Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell and other masters of Scandinavian mayhem. Smith, who has family ties to Sweden, works a customarily Nordic twist, too, by setting family members at one another's throatsand quite unnicely, too. A frantic email ("Nothing else, just my name, an exclamation mark") alerts Daniel to the fact that something is rotten across the North Sea, where Mum has been parked in a hospital while Dad mutters worriedly about her declining mental faculties. Ah, but Mum, who turns up in London, having fled, may not be loony at all. Indeed, she has a bag full of notes about Dad's late-blooming nefariousness: "In this satchel," she intones, "is some of the evidence I've collected over the summer." Evidence of what? Well, out among the cornflowers and hollyhocks, a corpse, maybe more than one, might just lie, for Dad has a kinky, hidden side. Meanwhile, Mum is old-school enough to believe that the fairy-tale world of trolls and goblins lies on the edge of the forest, though her hypotheses about the teenage girl who's gone missing from their bucolic farm town have an eminently practical side. Smith does creepy very well, setting scenes that slowly build in intensity, and he keeps readers guessing about who can and cannot be trusted. He also has a knack for finding the ominous in the picturesque, so a candlelight procession of "women dressed in bridal white" turns into a backdrop for a discovery that Daniel isn't quite prepared to make. And, it being Sweden, even bad guys and red herrings are neat, orderly and eminently polite: "It wasn't enough for Hkan to attack me," notes Daniel. "He wanted my permission to do so."They're resourcefully lethal as well. A satisfying mystery on ground that, though familiar, manages to yield surprises in Smith's skillful telling. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
