Burntown

May 8, 2017
Fans of McMahon’s eight earlier novels (The Winter People, etc) will be intrigued by this complex and quirky mystery set in a rundown Vermont mill town, where orphaned teenage Eva (street name Necco) lives in an abandoned car with her boyfriend, Hermes. Her grandparents have been murdered, her parents also died suspiciously, and her brother is missing. Necco recalls a mysterious machine, built by her father from plans stolen from Thomas Edison, that can talk with the dead; a killer now wants those plans and thinks Necco has them. Through a series of strange events, Necco is befriended by the Fire Eaters, a group of outcast nomadic women; Theo, a female student drug dealer; and Pru, the school cafeteria worker. There might be two killers after Necco and the plans, and as her memory of earlier family deaths returns, she realizes she does know enough about her father’s strange machine to be in danger. This is a well-crafted story with plenty of suspense to keep readers engrossed.

March 15, 2017
McMahon (The Winter People, 2014, etc.) swoops readers off to a setting straight out of a modern, but much starker, Grimm's fairy tale in this odd story with a touch of the supernatural.In 1975, Miles Sandeski, hiding in the bushes during a game of Robin Hood, saw a man wearing a chicken mask cut his mother's throat as she lounged in the backyard. Years later, Miles has grown up bereft of family, since his father, accused of the murder, has hung himself. Now Miles has a family of his own: Lily, who was his childhood sweetheart, and their daughter, Eva. Soon their family extends to Errol, an unexplained addition they treat as a son. Miles has a secret his father entrusted to him in the form of some plans, stolen from Thomas Edison, for a machine that, once built, will allow communication with the dead. Miles keeps the plans hidden, but he builds the machine, and soon tragedy strikes and a flood washes away their home, leaving Miles and Errol dead and Lily and Eva (now known as Necco) living as vagrants. They make their way to a homeless camp where Lily joins a mystical group of women. But she, too, dies, and soon Necco is living in an abandoned car with her boyfriend, Hermes. Then everything goes awry, and Necco is being pursued by an evil man her mother called -Snake Eyes- or -Chicken Man- while trying to stay one step ahead of him. McMahon brings in a cast of oddball characters--a girl fleeing a drug dealer, a fat woman, a ghost from her past--and combines them into one hodgepodge of a strange, fanciful tale. Less a mystery or thriller than a journey into a city where no one wants to go. Weirdly entertaining but anticlimactic in the end.

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Starred review from April 15, 2017
McMahon's latest (after The Winter People, 2014) is a bar-raising blend of her trademark sense of nostalgia and taut suspense, and an innovative take on the hero's quest built around a perfectly assembled cast: a resourceful heroine with a haunting past; a high-school girl dodging a drug dealer's wrath; a school lunch lady with a circus-star alter ego; a food-delivery man turned private detective; and a troupe of magical women who see the beyond. After a flood drowns her father and brother, Necco and her mother take to the streets of Burntown, a declining industrial burg leaning on its local university. They're hiding from Snake Eyes, whom her mother claims is hunting them to learn their family secret and to bury his own. When Necco's mom dies, Necco emerges from the shadows to forge a new future with Hermes, who promises a life-changing surprise but is murdered before he can reveal his secret. Necco is the prime suspect. Relying on her expertise at hiding and the unique skills offered by the band of endearing misfits drawn to her quest, Necco sets out to find Hermes' killer. But when Hermes' secret connects buried memories of the flood, her family's cycle of murders, and a machine that can channel the dead, Necco realizes that her mother's crackpot theories are horrifically real. A stunning genre blend of thriller and fantasy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2017

The very man who killed Miles Sandeski's mom when he was ten years old has now attacked his daughter, who ends up hanging out in a desolate neck of the woods called Burntown. And she's still being stalked. From the New York Times best-selling author of The Winter People.

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