The crooked house

Christobel Kent

Book - 2016

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FICTION/Kent, Christobel
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Subjects
Genres
Suspense fiction
Published
New York : Sarah Crichton Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016.
Language
English
Main Author
Christobel Kent (-)
Edition
First American edition
Physical Description
357 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780374131821
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

LET'S MAKE A LIST of the dubious delights that await you in HONKY TONK SAMURAI (Mulholland, $26), the latest outing for Joe R. Lansdale's perpetual bad boys, Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. There's excessive violence (eye-gouging and such), to be sure, as well as raunchy language, sexist attitudes, tasteless humor, adolescent clowning around and general vulgarity. Not to mention characters named Weasel and Booger. Hap, who's proud to identify himself as a "very juvenile and pretty crass" rebel from East Texas, and his sidekick, Leonard, who's black, gay and tougher than rawhide, step into it with both feet when Leonard beats up a citizen on his own front lawn after seeing him abusing his dog. Then Lilly Buckner, a foul-mouthed old lady who recorded the dust-up on her tablet, blackmails them into looking for her granddaughter, who has disappeared from the dealership where she worked selling high-end used cars. It doesn't take long for Hap and Leonard to figure out that something hotter than vintage autos is being peddled from this showroom, but the nature of the merchandise and the extent of the criminal enterprise involved in its distribution will have the boys facing the Dixie Mafia. Lansdale's characters can be as down-to-earth as Hap's live-in girlfriend, Brett, who owns the private investigation agency where he and Leonard work. Others, like the transgender Frank, who acts as a front for the real owners of Frank's Unique Used Cars, are more loosely tethered to this green earth. And then there are the bad guys, from the bikers who ride with Apocalypse on Wheels to various locally grown sociopaths ("Some got three teeth and two are in their pocket"). Best of all are the women warriors like Vanilla Ride, who shows up for battle in "black leather pants so tight you could see the outline of a quarter in her pocket" and keeps a stash of sniper rifles in the back seat of her 1982 Buick. She's a pure computer-generated action figure auditioning for her own video game - and a ton of fun. WHEN YOU READ about sadists who have brutalized their housekeepers or au pairs, you try not to think about what life was like for those poor slaveys. But Minette Walters lets her imagination run free in THE CELLAR (Mysterious, $24) and emerges with an intimate and upsetting story about Ebuka and Yetunde Songoli, a rich immigrant couple from an unnamed West African nation who claimed 8-year-old Muna from an orphanage and took her to England. Confined to the cellar on a wretched mattress and allowed upstairs only to cook and clean, Muna is routinely raped by her master and beaten by her mistress (who insists on being called "Princess") until she's 14, when the younger of the Songolis' two sons fails to show up at school and a policewoman arrives at the house to question the family. Walters is no Ruth Rendell, but here she writes with the subtle cruelty and pitiless insights of that author's alter ego, Barbara Vine. There's no mercy in her depiction of the abusive Songolis, yet Muna enjoys a gratifying reversal of fortune when the visits of the police compel the couple to pass her off as their disabled daughter. And Walters has more sinister plans for this clever girl, who is soon able to declare: "I am what you and Princess have made me, Master," proving she has assimilated the lessons in evil she learned at their hands. TOWNS THAT FALL on the glide paths to airport runways are great locations for a book like WHERE IT HURTS (Putnam, $27), the first in a new series by Reed Farrel Coleman about Gus Murphy, a morose part-time house detective who drives a courtesy van between the Paragon Hotel ("paragon of nothing so much as proximity," according to Gus) and Long Island MacArthur Airport in Suffolk County. As an ex-cop, Gus was well acquainted with small-time crooks like Tommy D., who turns up at the hotel and gets nowhere when he begs him to investigate the murder of his son. Gus is too broken up about his own son's death to handle another father's grief, but when Tommy is also gunned down, guilt and "a sense of purpose beyond mourning" jolt him back to life. Although it's overplotted, Coleman's busy book - set far from the Hamptons in "those ugly patches we Long Islanders like to pretend don't exist"- has plenty of robust regional flavor. THE GOTHIC THRILLER is a treacherous genre, but Christobel Kent does a nice job balancing the requisite features of dreamy romance and eerie atmosphere in THE CROOKED HOUSE (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26). When she was still in her teens, Esme survived a massacre that took the lives of her mother, twin sisters and older brother and left her father a brain-damaged wreck. You'd think that as a grown woman who now lives in London and calls herself Alison, she'd have the sense to stay far away from the scene of that atrocity. But her lover, an older academic who knows nothing of her past, sweet-talks her into going to a wedding back in Saltleigh, a bleak estuary town where "all roads led to the water" and the "fossilized stumps" of Saxon villages lie buried in the marshes. Although the father of the bride insists that "this is a perfectly normal village," Saltleigh's brooding atmosphere and history of violent tragedy make both the town and its unfortunate inhabitants seem hopelessly cursed.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 7, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review

Kent branches out here from her line of police procedurals set in Florence (her most recent is The Killing Room, 2015) into a psychological thriller. The novel stars a young woman, Alison, who wants nothing more than to distance herself from her past, which it's clear from the beginning involved something horrendous happening in her childhood home, an isolated, soul-sucking place located on isolated marshland. Kent hints quite a bit about what this horror was, but it should be obvious early on. Alison has a quiet job doing accounts for a publishing house, but her disappearing act is disrupted when her boyfriend invites her to spend a week (for a wedding) in the very town she has spent her life running from. Quicker than you can say Now, why is she doing that? Alison returns home, and is plunged into confronting the trauma of her childhood. The back-and-forth shuttling between present and past will intrigue readers, but it's not enough to keep anyone guessing (unless they're very bad guessers).--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this haunting if flawed standalone from British author Kent (A Florentine Revenge), the former Esme Grace, now living in London under a new legal identity as Alison, is slowly building the semblance of a normal life. Somehow, she has managed to survive the slaughter of her family when she was 14 in the Essex village of Saltleigh-but now a promising romance forces her back to the village. Though awakening the traumatic memories she has struggled so long to repress is the last thing Alison wants, she fears that if she refuses to accompany her older lover, Paul Bartlett, to the wedding of Morgan Carter, his former flame, in Saltleigh, the relationship is doomed. Little does Alison realize that much graver dangers await, such as her discovery of evidence that casts a startling new light on her long-ago trauma. This psychological thriller falters down the homestretch under the weight of too many unbelievable plot twists, but until then this is a suspenseful ride with a gutsy heroine. Agent: Victoria Hobbs, A.M. Heath (U.K.). (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

What's not to love about a chilling psychological thriller featuring a claustrophobic English seaside town, the heroine the sole survivor of a family massacre, and her intriguing relationship with an older, slightly dominating man? Comparisons to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca are apt for Kent's ("-Sandro Cellini" mysteries) most recent stand-alone novel. Alison (formerly Esme) lives quietly in London, connecting with few people and drawing little attention to herself, having changed her name after her family's murder a decade before. Her relationship with Paul is the longest she's had, in no small part because she asks him no questions about his personal life, and expects from him the same. When he invites her to a former girlfriend's wedding in her old hometown, she does her best to dodge the invitation but can't quite manage. The backstory is delivered piecemeal, and Alison's memories of the night her family was slaughtered by her father haunt the atmosphere, lending a fully satisfying air of menace. VERDICT Improbable, grim, disturbing fun-highly recommended for fans of the genre.-Victoria Caplinger, -Durham, NC © 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

Thirteen years later, a young woman who survived the slaughter of her family returns to the scene of the crime. Her name was Esme, and she was nearly 14. She had a mum and a dad, 8-year-old twin sisters, and a big brother named Joeuntil the night she went down from her bedroom and found them all shot with a rifle. Now her name is Alison. She works in accounting at a publishing house in London and has no family at all, except a father in an institutiona vegetable after the botched suicide attempt that followed the murders. Kent's (The Killing Room, 2015, etc.) latest psychological thriller opens as Alison's boyfriend, Paul, invites her to attend a wedding in her old hometown of Saltleigh. " 'The wedding's on Saturday but I thought we'd go a few days ahead of time. Tuesday,' said Paul, his voice warm now, reassured. 'Make a, you know, a little holiday of it.' " It won't be much of a holiday, actually, as the many dark secrets of this "poxy little dump" of a village spill out and new crimes begin to pile up as soon as they arrive. Alison's tragedy was one of many: there was a baby who died in an electrical fire, a boy killed in a hit-and-run, a girl with leukemia, a pedophile, an assortment of drunks and suicides. As soon as Alison gets to town and her cover begins to crumble, she runs into her old best friend, the detective who investigated the case, and other townspeople who pop in to offer clues and accusations. Just about everyone knows things about Alison's family that she does not. Meanwhile, her boyfriend has a disturbingly close friendship with the bride-to-be. Bleak, suspenseful writing keeps the momentum high despite a surfeit of characters and contrivances. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.