Review by New York Times Review
KARIN FOSSUM may be the most unsentimental crime novelist since Ruth Rendell's alter ego, Barbara Vine. On the very first page of HELL FIRE (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24), a young mother and her 4-year-old son lie dead of multiple stab wounds in the ramshackle little trailer in the Norwegian woods where they had spent the night. Not far into the story, we're introduced to a character who, we'll very soon deduce, is almost certainly the killer. Surprisingly, anticipating the ending doesn't destroy the suspense; in fact, imagining the horror that awaits actually increases our sense of dread. Lacking the reader's omniscience, Inspector Konrad Sejer must painstakingly piece together the lives of the victims by questioning anyone who might have information about this ghastly crime. Sejer is a thoughtful interviewer, "but he was a serious man and sometimes prone to deep melancholy," so it's inevitable that the more this sensitive detective learns, the more depressed he gets. (At least he's not morbid, like the police pathologist who keeps a pinup photo of the deceased Marilyn Monroe, her face "puffy and formless," hanging in the morgue.) The dead woman, Bonnie Hayden, had no intention of becoming a single mother, but when her husband left her for a younger woman she was forced to put their son, Simon, in day care and become a home health aide. Her elderly clients could be difficult, demanding and sometimes quite mean, like cranky old Erna, who worked her like a dray horse. But they're all in mourning at the unusually well-attended funeral, which comforts Inspector Sejer as much as it saddens him. Another parental bond figures in a parallel plot about a mother's boundless love and a son's obsessive need to find his errant father - or at least his grave. Fossum writes with as much compassion about Thomasine and Eddie Malthe as she does about Bonnie and Simon. But in Kari Dickson's translation there's always something dark hovering on the edge of the page, something about getting what you wish for and the crushing irony when that gift proves your undoing. HARLAN COBEN MUST have been reading Dickens while he was writing HOME (Dutton, $28), in which a flamboyant villain known as Fat Gandhi houses the "workers" in his child prostitution ring in the basement of an entertainment arcade called AdventureLand. Coben's goodguy hero, Myron Bolitar, runs afoul of this nasty piece of work when he answers the call of his best bud, Win Lockwood, who has spotted a missing American boy in London among the young hustlers working the stroll under the King's Cross overpass. Myron may be the one with the hero complex and Win the one with the killer instincts ("I am good with a straight razor"), but when Patrick Moore disappeared 10 years earlier, the kidnappers also took Win's 6-year-old cousin - and family is family. Fans of this popular series, which has been on hiatus for five years (since the publication of "Live Wire"), know the drill: You grab the plot thread and hang on for dear life while Coben yanks it into a noose. Promises are also made of "death and destruction and mayhem" and duly delivered in terrific action scenes, including a wild escape through the tunnel beneath Fat Gandhi's empire. Fun is fun, but the lasting appeal of this series lies in Coben's sympathy for ordinary people who do desperate things when they're swept up in circumstances they can't control. LESS THAN A MONTH before World War I comes to an end, Bess Crawford is shot by a German sniper who didn't notice that she was tending to a wounded soldier. In THE SHATTERED TREE (Morrow/HarperCollins, $25.99), Charles Todd's heroic battlefield nurse is shipped off to a hospital in Rouen, but once she's on the mend her thoughts keep turning to one of her patients, a soldier who wore a French uniform but spoke flawless German when he cried out in pain. Although she's meant to be convalescing, Bess finds ways to carry on her search for this mysterious man, whose snapshot so distresses a nun that she calls him "a monster." As always in this immensely satisfying series, Todd heightens the mystery by setting it within a war-shattered world of battered villages, barren farms and broken people. IF EVER A novel should be read with a friend, Sharon Bolton's DAISY IN CHAINS (Minotaur, $25.99) would be it. (You really don't want to face that mind-blowing ending alone.) Serial killers are meant to be creepy, but Hamish Wolfe, the handsome surgeon convicted of murdering four grossly overweight women, is so charismatic he has legions of female fans. Maggie Rose, a well-known attorney and author, isn't one of them. But Hamish's mother is so sure of his innocence she convinces Maggie to begin researching a book that's meant to exonerate him. Even in rough draft form, it's better written than the dodgy articles and blog posts woven into this twisted plot. Fat-shaming is a real issue. "We associate good looks with goodness," Maggie says. "We just do." Our infatuation with vicious criminals also has consequences. Bolton views her psychologically complex characters with such unsettling insight, it's hard to evade certain cold truths - and harder yet not to wince.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 29, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Maggie Rose is a best-selling true-crime writer who chooses her projects carefully. Hamish Wolfe is a serial killer convicted of murdering at least three plus-size women, and he also happens to be good looking and charismatic so much so that he has a fan club, led by his mother. Mother and son try to engage Maggie to prove Hamish innocent, but they are unable to offer any new evidence or alternative theories. Nevertheless, Maggie is intrigued and decides to do a little preliminary digging. She speaks with the case detective, visits Hamish in prison, and speaks with the group that wants him freed. There are enough anomalies that Maggie investigates further and turns up some interesting evidence. Meanwhile, someone is snooping around her house, and the tension ratchets up after a break-in. The story is enriched with newspaper articles and various prison letters, and the narrative offers a trail of red herrings. Unfortunately, the ending goes off the rails, in part because yet another author feels obligated to have her unreliable narrator nod to Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (2012).--Alesi, Stacy Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Cancer-surgeon Hamish Wolfe, the villain of this plodding and predictable thriller from Mary Higgins Clark Award-winner Bolton (Little Black Lies), is stuck at Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight, having been convicted two years earlier for the murders of three overweight women in Somerset. The outside campaign to secure his release, known as the Wolfe Pack and led by his mother, reaches out to reclusive but successful attorney and author Maggie Rose, whose success rate for overturning the guilty convictions of seemingly heinous criminals is astonishing. Rose, who's reluctant to invest time in a case that seems airtight, befriends Det. Sgt. Pete Weston, the case's lead detective. At first, nothing points to another killer, but Rose smells a rat. She wades into the murky waters of Wolfe's Oxford past and the socially charged debate over body image that plagues the case and its victims. In a text overflowing with letters and emails, Bolton leaves little room for any real suspense or richly developed characters. Agent: Anne-Marie Doulton, Ampersand Agency (U.K.). (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Hamish Wolfe has served two years in prison for the murders of four obese women. He claims innocence and contacts controversial lawyer and best-selling author -Maggie Rose to overturn his conviction-and write his story. Prepare to be drawn into this mystery through alternating perspectives and Bolton's epistolary style, which serve to misdirect readers and only provide subtle clues to the truth. Through the newspaper articles, love letters, book drafts, and the traditional narrative, readers will learn of Wolfe's off-kilter fan club, the budding relationship between Maggie and the detective on the case, and why these four lives were taken. VERDICT The literary styling of this latest work from Bolton (Little Black Lies; "Lacey Flint" series) makes this a quick read, but the multiple plot threads will occupy readers' minds for days after they finish. Fans of Lisa Gardner and Karin Slaughter will savor this twisty crime novel that invites many rereadings. [See Prepub Alert, 3/14/16.]-Natalie Browning, J. Sargeant Reynolds Community Coll. Lib., Richmond, VA © Copyright 2016. 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.
