Review by New York Times Review
ANGELIC LITTLE BABIES make idiots of us all. A pregnant, unmarried grocery store clerk named Agatha dotes on her unborn child in THE SECRETS SHE KEEPS (Scribner, $26), Michael Robotham's insightful psychological thriller about the joys and fears of impending motherhood. Agatha is consumed by all things prenatal, and especially the pregnancy of Meghan, a well-offand beautifully turned-out married customer, also in her third trimester, who represents perfection to a woman whose absent boyfriend wants no part of fatherhood. Dreaming of a future life when she and Meghan have become friends, Agatha makes plans: "We'll do yoga classes and swap recipes and meet for coffee every Friday morning with our mothers' group." When Agatha and Meghan, who alternate as narrators, realize that their due dates both fall in December, a bond is forged. Meghan welcomes Agatha into her home and invites the kind of intimate exchanges she'll come to regret when her new acquaintance turns out to be a stalker. "I know her timetable, her friends, her habits and the rhythm of her life," Agatha says proudly. But if Agatha isn't as innocent as Meghan thinks, Meghan isn't as wonderful as Agatha fantasizes. Both women, in fact, are clutching secrets that can ruin friendships, destroy marriages and shatter lives. Agatha is the more interesting character, with her harrowing history and desperate yearning for a child to heal the wounds of past traumas. Her neediness may be fanatical and her assumptions psychotic, but her suffering is real. And she's still bitter about mothers who thoughtlessly assume that some women are simply "too selfish or too choosy" to have children. But beneath the chattiness of her parenting blog, "Mucky Kids," Meghan's uneasy narrative voice registers her fears for her newborn son and her own private qualms. "I am a cliché," she admits. "My blog sums up my existence - safe, uncontentious, and shallow." Both women are extremely articulate, but when the plot takes an unspeakable turn, they're no longer able to hide behind words. OF ALL THE places where you really do not want to come across a couple of nut cases with guns, a zoo full of wild animals would be high on the list. Gin Phillips taps into that primal fear with FIERCE KINGDOM (Viking, $25), a heartthumping thriller about a mother who finds herself and her 4-yearold son trapped when two marksmen start hunting down visitors. Joan is about to leave the park with Lincoln, a dear child who entertains himself by reciting college football chants, when the sound of shots sends her backtracking into the deeper parts of the zoo. Phillips dutifully sketches out a back story for the gunmen, but once Joan's maternal instincts kick in, she summons her survival skills, and the thrust of the narrative turns to her nerve-plucking race for safety, past "wild things in boxes." Packing 40 pounds of human cub on her hip, she sprints from one habitat to the next and in the face of unexpected danger gives new meaning to the term "tiger mom." Compressed into a little over three hours, the story flies by like a gazelle being chased by a lion and is easily consumed in a single sitting. VICTORIAN LADIES IN distress always consult Sherlock Holmes. Their plebeian sisters must settle for the seedy sleuth in Mick Finlay's first mystery, ARROWOOD (Mira, paperback, $15.99), who lives in a squalid district of South London and caters to clients like Miss Caroline Cousture, whose brother has disappeared from his kitchen job at the Barrel of Beef chophouse. William Arrowood is a Falstaffian fellow who lives behind a pudding shop and prides himself on being "an emotional agent, not a deductive agent," like his famous nemesis. "I see people," he boasts. "I see into their souls." His assistant, Norman Barnett, is content to study the filthy streets teeming with "nighttime people" who "stagger and shriek," blind with drink and despair. Gin is both medicine and religion for many of these slum dwellers, who privately believe that Jack the Ripper is "God's punishment for the drink." WOULDN'T A HAIRDRESSER know not to take a hair dryer into the bathtub? That's not the only thing fishy about the death of Lorna Belling, whose husband and lover are equally horrid in NEED YOU DEAD (Macmillan, $27.95), the latest mystery in a scrupulously maintained procedural series by Peter James. And of course, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, a decent and damned attractive senior officer with the Sussex Police, is too shrewd to write offLorna's death as a classic domestic abuse case. Despite the glaringly obvious clues pointing to her jealous husband, no Roy Grace mystery can be resolved without one of the detective's intense interviews, which he compares to "games of poker," having perfected the fine art of bluffing, along with the unnerving skill of reading a subject's body language. But he may have met his match in 10-year-old Bruno, the son he never knew he had until his first wife broke the news posthumously in a suicide note. Grace is a detective known for his human touch, but a moody little boy may prove to be his toughest challenge. MARILYN STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 27, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
South London's Bermondsey and its fiercely edgy detective, William Arrowood, possess little to recommend themselves in comparison to the more famous deductive expert, Sherlock Holmes, and his more sophisticated Westminster. Still, Arrowood, an emotional agent who sees into souls, is the best Bermondsey can offer. He and his assistant, Barnett, accept a missing-persons case, although they know the (lovely) client is lying (of course) and that inevitably they will seek clues from a crime boss they wish they didn't know personally. Layers upon layers later, when all is very nearly lost, only Arrowood's pugnacious tenacity can ferret out the truth. Finlay captures the filth, frustration, and dark humor of the Victorian-era slum, plopping the reader into the story among the odoriferous, life-encrusted characters with a realism decidedly un-Sherlockian. Still, the tropes are similar, and Doyle's fans will be entertained. While waiting for the next installment, why not hang out with cranky, intimidating Cyrus Barker in Will Thomas' mysteries (Some Danger Involved, 2004) and the psychically astute Nine-Nails McGray in Oscar de Muriel's Frey and McGray series (The Strings of Murder, 2016)?--Baker, Jen Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Finlay does a good job of creating a plausible alternative to Sherlock Holmes in his first novel and series debut. In London in 1895, photographer Caroline Cousture, a French woman, turns to Arrowood because she can't afford Holmes's fees. Her brother, Thierry, has vanished after being accused of stealing from the bakery where he worked. Though Arrowood suspects her of lying, he accepts the case, only to find that it reawakens some painful and dangerous memories. Arrowood was once a successful reporter before he lost his job to a relative of the new owner of his paper. His reputation for muckraking led to a career as a detective and an eventual partnership with former law clerk Norman Barnett. Their first joint inquiry, into a suspected bigamy, ended disastrously, with an innocent man losing his life. Arrowood took to the bottle, causing his wife to leave him. Finlay's characterizations are better developed than in some similar series, such as Will Thomas's Barker and Llewelyn mysteries (Hell Bay, etc.). Agent: Jo Unwin, Jo Unwin Literary Agency (U.K.). (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT While the wealthy turn to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson for help when the police fail them, the working class relies on investigative agent -William -Arrowood and assistant Norman -Barnett. Arrowood resents Holmes's fame and insists he can read people better than the celebrated sleuth. In South London in 1895, Arrowood hasn't had a case in weeks, so he agrees to find Caroline Consture's missing brother. When he and Barnett learn -Caroline's brother disappeared while working for the notorious Mr. Cream, they regret that decision. Witnesses are murdered when they're involved with the man. The case is so convoluted that Barnett admits, "Sometimes I lose sight of the case"; readers may become confused as well. VERDICT Unfortunately, the plot of Finlay's debut mystery gets lost within the tangle of various police, criminal, and political groups. Still, fans of Sherlock Holmes might appreciate an alternate view of Victorian London from the perspective of people struggling to survive. [Optioned for television.]-LH © Copyright 2017. 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
Finlay debuts with a tale built on a wonderful premise: a downscale Sherlock Holmes for the rest of us.Just like everyone else in 1895 London, French photographer Caroline Cousture would love to hire Holmes to investigate the disappearance of her brother, a pastry cook who's gone missing from the Barrel of Beef, the chophouse where he found employment. But, unable to afford Holmes' presumably stratospheric pricesthough his clients are rarely shown actually paying himshe has to settle for ex-journalist William Arrowood. In some ways it's an excellent choice. Arrowood is obsessed with his great rival; he can expound on every limitation and logical fallacy in A Study in Scarlet and "A Scandal in Bohemia." In other ways, Caroline's choice is less fortunate. Arrowood, who declares to his client and his amanuensis, Norman Barnett, that he's "an emotional agent, not a deductive agent," isn't much of a detective at all. His first interview, with a barmaid Thierry Cousture had befriended at the Barrel of Beef, gets the poor girl killed, and Neddy, the likable neighborhood 10-year-old who does his legwork, gets kidnapped twice, the second time from under Barnett's nose. Even worse, Arrowood's sleuthing skills, at least in this first recorded case, seem limited to antagonizing Inspector Petleigh, repeatedly butting heads with Stanley Cream, who owns the Barrel of Beef, and calling in an expert to identify the bullet the dead barmaid was clutching in her hand. But Finlay has a fine time recasting the friendship between Holmes and Watson, as Arrowood and Barnett repeatedly quarrel, swap obscenities and threats, and pummel each other. A great concept worked out with more grit than inspiration. The inevitable franchise has already been optioned for television, a medium you can only hope will hang on to the best bits here and toss out the rest. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
