Review by New York Times Review
LOUISE PENNY wrote the book on escapist mysteries - a dozen of them, in fact, almost all set in the sheltered Canadian village of Three Pines. "It was a haven, a buffer, from the cares and cruelty of the world," she tells us in GLASS HOUSES (Minotaur, $28.99), a place seemingly so free of malice and discord that Armand Gamache, chief superintendent of the Surete du Québec, and his wife, Reine-Marie, have made it their sanctuary. One of the pleasures of returning to this series is visiting old friends in the village like Gabri and Olivier, who run the convivial B&B; the artist Clara Morrow, whose startling portraits will haunt you; and (a personal favorite) Ruth ¿ardo, a poet who accurately describes herself as "a crazy old woman who prays for Satan and has a duck." The strangeness starts with the traditional Halloween party at the local bistro, attended by a masked, hooded figure in a black cloak who reappears the following day to take up sentry duty on the village green. Still as death and silent as the grave, the visitor resists efforts to engage him in conversation. After a while, people just leave him alone and go about their business - all except a Spanish-speaking guest at the B&B who identifies this specter as a cobrador del frac, a collector of unpaid debts (including moral debts) who follows defaulters, shaming them with his remorseless gaze. In the presence of this wraith, the villagers begin to exhume their own guilty secrets. A creepy twist in the narrative traces the cobrador back to medieval Spain, when plague victims, lepers and witches were consigned to a remote island to die. Those who survived and managed to return to the mainland silently stalked the people who had banished them and, over the years, became mythic figures. In his dark robes, the cobrador becomes a vivid metaphor for opioids like fentanyl, the "modern-day Black Death" that drug cartels are smuggling across the border through Three Pines and into Vermont. If Gamache can't contain this plague, our last hope may be Superman. WELCOME TO THE CRYPT, a "celluloid necropolis" for folks like Alex Whitman, a snarky film fanatic who has been hired by another fanatic to find what may be the first motion picture ever made. Jonathan Skariton's debut novel, SÉANCE INFERNALE (Knopf, $26.95), named for that very item, is a dense but thrilling exploration of the mystery surrounding a film that was said to have predated both Edison and the brothers Lumiere, but disappeared, along with its inventor, on a train to Paris in 1890. The plot is packed with film ephemera, some of it mesmerizing, some of it as unnecessary as the secondary plot, set in Edinburgh (what would mystery writers do without Edinburgh?), about a present-day serial killer who stashes his victims in the underground vaults of the Old City. "Some of these art-house freak films make my skin crawl," says a police constable, referring to the killer's snuff video. But as long as Skariton keeps to movie history, we can concentrate on other mysteries - like whether Edison murdered his rival. A CHILD'S rage can be fierce. Consider Ruby, the almost feral heroine of Kate Hamer's domestic thriller, THE DOLL FUNERAL (Melville House, $25.99), who learns on her 13th birthday that she was adopted. Ruby is helpless to do anything about the beatings she receives from the man she thought was her father, but the dramas she stages for her dolls tell the story. "My play had changed: I now arranged for them to have little accidents about the house - a trip and a tumble down the stairs, or Sindy's head stuck in the oven while Paul stood outside and watched her through the window." So it's no surprise when Ruby puts a match to her tormentor's clothes and sets a greenhouse on fire. Hamer's melodic voice hovers between the cold realism of those vicious beatings and an otherworldly mysticism that empowers Ruby to see dead people like Shadow, a young soul who longs to be alive again. But it takes a kind doctor to identify Ruby's ghosts as her ancestors. "There's no specters, or apparitions," he tells her. "The real ghosts are just family." The family she's longed for her entire life. GUTS, GORE AND A LITTLE S&M - what else would you expect from Paul Cleave, a New Zealand author who uses words like lethal weapons. A KILLER HARVEST (Atria, $26) tosses another ingredient into the mix: the fear of losing your identity. In an experimental operation, Joshua Logan, 16 years old and blind since birth, receives the eyes of his father, a detective with the Christchurch Police Department who died during the ill-timed arrest of a chain-saw killer. The operation doesn't go exactly as planned, leaving Joshua's newfound vision a bit, well, warped. Cleave follows the boy as he explores his surroundings with a sense of anxiety and awe, but for the most part he writes rough stuff. Dogs are killed, young women are kidnapped and tied up, and one unfortunate soul is chopped into pieces, then stashed in the freezer for a rainy day. And there's an inspired cliffhanger ending that promises a lot more mayhem to come. 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 [September 10, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* On Ruby's thirteenth birthday, she learns that she's adopted, and her heart sings; she sends up a whispered wish for her real parents to rescue her from her abusive home. After a severe beating, Ruby runs away and finds refuge with three siblings who have been abandoned by their eccentric parents, but their house holds secrets that throw Ruby for yet another loop. Ruby's story is overlain with a gossamer of the supernatural so delicate only she can see it and the lost souls it conceals. These figures haunt the narrative, particularly Ruby's friend Shadow Boy, as she endeavors to survive the world's harshness. Her original quest to find her real parents gradually distills into a search for love, during which she assumes the responsibility of helping the mired spirits move on. Hamer (The Girl in the Red Coat, 2016) handles language beautifully, fashioning effortlessly evocative sentences that place the reader beside Ruby, like one of her many ghosts. Her narrative is intercut with that of her birth mother's and the slightly cryptic monologues of Shadow Boy, all necessary threads in a well-designed whole. An unblinking light shines through this tenacious girl, who makes a goddess of Siouxsie Sioux and dreams of the mother she never knew, for she refuses to be broken.--Smith, Julia Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
How desperately do the dead wish to interact with the living? This is a strong underlying theme in Hamer's second novel (after The Girl in the Red Coat). Ruby can see dead people, an ability she's been peripherally aware of since she was very young. On her 13th birthday, Ruby learns she was adopted; she confides this to someone she refers to as Shadow, an ever-present ghostlike companion who has tried to protect her all her life. Ruby, energized by the desire to find her birth parents, finally fights back against her abusive adoptive father. The consequences lead to her taking up with an odd group of siblings living hand-to-mouth in their family's rundown mansion while their parents are away in India on a spiritual quest. As Ruby's history becomes clearer, Hamer-with evocative and vivid prose-explores the depths to which a mother will go to connect with her child, while Ruby discovers her family's secrets and learns a true family can be the people we choose to live with, not just the family into which we are born. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
When Ruby learns on her 13th birthday that her mom and dad aren't her real parents, she sets out with her friend Shadow Boy to find the truth about her origins. Shadow Boy isn't real, and he isn't imaginary; he is one of the many spirits that interact with Ruby, as she has a connection with the dead that she has never fully understood. Her spirit friends appear throughout the novel, playing a crucial role in muddling Ruby's progress while she stays with a group of seemingly abandoned children for a month-an interlude that is mildly reminiscent of the lost boys in Peter Pan but not nearly as clever. Since Ruby is easily distracted, the sharpest components of this novel are those in the voice of Anna, Ruby's birth mother, as she explains why she was forced to abandon her child and how Ruby came to live with her abusive adoptive family. Verdict Parts of Ruby's mythology are underdeveloped, as her role as a "hunter of souls" is never fully explained, but Hamer's sophomore effort (after The Girl in the Red Coat) is reminiscent enough of Kim Edwards's The Memory Keeper's Daughter to continue reading.-Tina Panik, Avon Free P.L., CT © 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
The story of a resilient young girl who has the eerie ability to see and speak with the dead.Set in the Forest of Dean and in London, this novel moves back and forth between two girls, 13-year-old Ruby, in 1983, and Anna, Ruby's young mother, in 1970. A third point of view peppers the novel, that of a boy simply called Shadow who follows alongside Ruby and has been by her side for as long as she can remember. Shadow, it becomes clear, is one among many specters only Ruby can see who begin to appear more and more over the course of the book. When the story begins, Ruby is living with her adopted parents, Mick, who is horribly abusive, and Barbara, who is helpless; back in 1970, Anna is pregnant and determined to put her child up for adoption, knowing that her lover, Lewis, will be crushingly disappointed to have to raise a child and stay in the Forest of Dean. Ruby's and Anna's stories develop side by side: Ruby eventually strikes back against Mick, hitting him with a wooden board as revenge for a particularly horrible beating, and runs away, finding refuge with her friend Tom and his sister and brother who are living alone in the hillstheir parents having abandoned them to "find themselves" in India. When Ruby is born, Anna cannot bear to give her up, and she and Lewis move with the baby to London, where he falls in with a criminal crowd, and Anna begins to feel detached, ultimately succumbing to postpartum psychosis and abandoning Ruby. Throughout the novel, Ruby is desperate to find her biological parents, thinking they will care for her as she's never been cared for. She discovers the truth in an unexpected place and more violence ensues. Hamer (The Girl in the Red Coat, 2015) has created a mystical world in which characters are haunted by specters of their present as well as their past, by the living and the lost. Her diction is lovely and tangible; describing the heightening frequency of Ruby's experiences with specters, she writes, "the skin of this world was thinning hour by hour so you could look through it like the papery bit of an onion." A powerful paranormal novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.