Suffer the Children

July 9, 2018
The death of 15-year-old Rachel Donahue, a recalcitrant resident at a Cleveland juvenile detention facility, kick starts bestseller Black’s well-crafted fourth thriller featuring forensic expert Maggie Gardiner (after Perish). Rachel fell three floors to the bottom of a stairwell, but whether she was pushed is unclear. As more residents die under suspicious circumstances, Maggie and homicide detective Jack Renner realize that a murderer is loose in the locked facility, where groups of children are carefully segregated and access to them is strictly supervised and limited. That the potential victims can be as lethal as the hunter stalking them complicates the case, as do Maggie’s fears that Jack is hiding a terrible secret. The pressure on Maggie only increases when her ex-husband, Det. Rick Gardiner, is assigned to investigate Jack’s past—something neither Maggie nor Jack can afford to have revealed. Black keeps the suspense high throughout. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Agency.

May 15, 2018
Children are dying at a Cleveland juvenile detention facility, many of whom have suffered horrible abuse or neglect and, in turn, have committed dreadful crimes. An apparent suicide of a teenage boy is followed by what seems the accidental death of a 15-year-old girl in a fall, but then a 10-year-old mute boy dies abruptly of what turns out to be a poisoning. Forensic investigator Maggie Gardiner, working with Detective Jack Renner and his partner, eventually spots the pattern and the perpetrator but not before the trio spends enough time at the facility to be the subjects themselves of attacks, as the fatalities of young people continue to increase. At the same time, homicide detective Rick Gardiner, Maggie's ex, is searching for a vigilante killer and begins to eye Renner as a suspect. With its solid grounding of information about child development, this fourth entry in the Gardiner and Renner series (after Perish, 2018) is instructional as well as being a well-plotted and -paced thriller with a pair of intriguing protagonists.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)