Review by New York Times Review
what do you do with a tired old cop? You give him a bright young rookie to keep him on the ball. In return for this infusion of energy, the kid gets the benefit of the broad experience and infinite wisdom of the veteran. That's the way it's supposed to work, anyway. But in the burning ROOM (Little, Brown, $28), Michael Connelly's latest Harry Bosch mystery, there's precious little wisdom the L.A.P.D. detective can impart to his new partner, Lucia (Lucy) Soto, about the curious case of a homicide victim who took 10 years to die. While playing in a mariachi band, Orlando Merced was apparently the accidental victim of a gang-related shooting, paralyzed after a bullet lodged in his spine. But it isn't until he dies and the bullet proves to have been shot from a rifle ("A drive-by with a rifle? Come on. Unlikely") that this cold case becomes an active homicide investigation. Since no amount of advanced technology can help when there's no more forensic evidence to process, Bosch takes the opportunity to show his partner how they did things in the old days. More important, he has some pointers on how to avoid the quicksand of departmental politics. Bosch, who's always been a rebel, lucks out with Lucy, since she's something of a maverick herself - secretly working off the clock on a cold case of her own, an unsolved arson in a day care home that took the lives of five of her childhood friends. A master at construction, Connelly finds a way to link the two cases, which burrow deep into Los Angeles's Latino community. But by then nobody's teaching anybody anything because Bosch and Lucy are working closely as a team. As often happens in Connelly's police procedurals, Bosch's meticulously built case is undermined by political corruption in high places, leaving him "suddenly sick to death of everything." But as he has aged, this cynical detective has also mellowed. Sitting in a jazz club listening to a young woman performing a "plaintive and sad" saxophone solo of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" gives Bosch hope that "there was still a chance for him, that he could still find whatever it was he was looking for, no matter how short his time was." IT'S AN IMAGE that's hard to forget: the severed but still clasped hands of two adulterous lovers, buried for years in a cookie tin. That's Ruth Rendell for you, offering a vision that's grim, grotesque and yet strangely beautiful. The extraordinary chain of events in THE GIRL NEXT DOOR (Scribner, $26) commences when these hands are unearthed by workmen digging out a cellar in the London suburb of Loughton. During the war, children used to play here, in the foundations of houses that were never built, and the discovery prompts a meeting of the survivors. Although these childhood friends are now old enough to have great-grandchildren, their further gatherings yield surprising consequences, including one romantic liaison that leads to happiness and another that leads to violence. Rendell makes clever work of a split time frame to transport her characters from the past to the present and back again. But her best, most idiosyncratic study is her portrait of the villain of the piece, a wicked man in his youth and an absolute devil in his dotage, determined to live to be 100 out of pure spite. not every Irish author is in love with the sound of his own voice. There's not much poetry in Stuart Neville's crime novels, which are set in Belfast and read like dispatches from a war zone - terse prose, dark thoughts, raw feelings, THE FINAL SILENCE (Soho Crime, $26.95) offers confirmation that the past is never past in Northern Ireland. Rea Carlisle didn't ask to be the custodian of her Uncle Raymond's nightmares, but that's what she inherits after he commits suicide and leaves his old house and all its secrets to her mother, who persuades Rea to move in and make it her own. But once she breaks down the locked door to the back bedroom and starts reading the entries in her uncle's journal, it's one horror after another. Although this is a more formal mystery than Neville's previous ones, its characters remain possessed by Belfast's old, familiar ghosts. SOPHIE LITTLEFIELD IS a regular writing machine. She churns out romantic novels, young adult novels, post-apocalyptic novels, historical novels and a fun series, set in rural Missouri, about a middle-aged widow who runs a sewing-machine repair shop and does a little vigilante work on the side, dispensing tough justice to abusive husbands, THE MISSING PLACE (Gallery Books, paper, $16) is something else again, a disturbing tale of two very different women, both anxious mothers, who meet in the remote North Dakota boom town where they've traveled in search of their sons, now missing from the oil rig where they worked. Colleen Mitchell comes from a wealthy suburb of Boston and is so shocked by the primitive living conditions in the oil fields that she's barely able to function. Shay Capparelli, the scrappy woman who rescues her, has better survival skills and is less inhibited about challenging the big oil company that's intent on stonewalling them. The two mothers are the unlikeliest of buddies, but when they learn how to work together they're positively ferocious - and as brave as any of those macho guys up on the rigs.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 2, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In her lengthy career (she's published more than 70 books), multiple-award-winning author Rendell has written about teenagers, the lonely, the lovelorn, the disturbed, the violated, and the just plain evil. This time she turns her keen eye on the elderly: how they manage the present, look toward the future, and, especially, remember the past. The story begins in the 1940s. After murdering his wife and her lover, a man buries their two joined hands in a tin box, deep in tunnels where his son and a group of other young children gather. There it stays for 60 years until a construction company unearths it. Such an old crime invites little interest from police until a link is discovered to an elderly man who lives in the area. As one of the children who played in the tunnels, the man volunteers to bring together the others, now mostly in their seventies, to see if anyone can help authorities. New information isn't forthcoming, but the reunion sparks old rivalries, loves, and disappointments that change the lives of everyone in the group. Using her customary spare yet decorous style and measured pace, Rendell, now in her 80s, beautifully and carefully individualizes each member of her ensemble cast, at the same time creating not a grim reminder of mortality but a picture of moribund lives renewed. A special book by a special writer. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Grand-master Rendell at her best is something to be savored by crime-fiction devotees of all ages, and this one, with the promised promotional effort, will find a large and eager audience.--Zvirin, Stephanie Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this assured novel of psychological suspense from Diamond Dagger Award-winner Rendell (The St. Zita Society), a gruesome discovery jolts a group of friends and acquaintances who grew up outside London during WWII. Two people's hands-severed and interred inside a cookie tin-are unearthed at a former construction site where they once hid and schemed. At the center of the now aged clique is the "girl next door," Daphne Jones, ever envied and admired. John "Woody" Winwood, a man whose wife went missing with her lover during the turmoil of the blitzkrieg, is a malevolent presence, past and present, in the story. In contemporary Britain, Winwood's son, Michael, must face his nonagenerian father, who abandoned him decades before and then married into money, inheriting a fortune from his subsequent wives. Rendell keeps the plot and the home fires burning, and the most memorable characters, Daphne and Woody, cast sufficient light to brighten their somewhat dull companions. Agent: Peter Matson, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Rendell's latest psychological suspense novel centers on a group of children who discover an underground tunnel and use it as their private hideaway. Sixty years later, when construction workers discover two skeletal hands in that same tunnel, the police investigation reunites the childhood friends. Each one brings plenty of personal baggage: it isn't long before two former lovers embark on an illicit affair, and another comes to believe that one of the hands belonged to a long-missing relative. Yet another questions his decision to cut his uncaring father out of his life and considers reestablishing communication. Past decisions cast their shadow over the present as the characters question both themselves and the choices they made long ago. VERDICT The three-time Edgar Award-winning author (The Water's Lovely; Portobello) creates another riveting story with her sharp characterization and keen sense of irony that will keep readers engaged from start to finish. Fans of mystery and psychological suspense, along with Rendell's loyal following, will love this complex story. [See Prepub Alert, 5/12/14.]-Linda Oliver, Colorado Springs (c) Copyright 2014. 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
Rendell's 65th novel shows the incalculable effects of a 70-year-old crime on a group of friendsschoolchildren when it happened, alarmingly unpredictable retirees now. One evening in 1944, John Winwood caught his wife, Anita, holding hands with another man. Taking the first opportunity to entice the lovers into his conjugal bed by pretending to take a trip, he strangled them both, then disposed of their bodies, but not before cutting off the offending hands, depositing them in a biscuit tin and burying it in a neighborhood tunnel. Two generations later, a construction project suddenly brings the biscuit tin to light, and the children who used to play in the tunnelsor the qanats, as the Winwoods' 12-year-old next-door neighbor, Daphne Jones, called themsoon connect the ghoulish find with the time when Winwood chased them all out of the qanats. Alan Norris and his wife, Rosemary, resolve to visit their old friend George Batchelor, whose wife, Maureen, writes to DI Colin Quell. While Quell awaits the results of tests on the ancient discovery, Alan unaccountably leaves Rosemary and takes up with Daphne, causing unfathomable hurt and confusion for his wife of 50 years, his daughter and his granddaughters. Winwood's son Michael, suddenly bereaved of Zoe Nicholson, the aunt who brought him up, feels a responsibility to reconnect with Clara Moss, his family's old cleaner, and his unloving father, who incredibly is still alive at 99 in the Urban Grange rest home. Complications will follow, but they're not at all the ones you'd expect. The sedate pace and sociological focus of Rendell's recent work (No Man's Nightingale, 2013, etc.) are quickened here by the capacity of her golden agers to act, and act out, in ways as surprising as they are logical. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
