The Night Bell (Hazel Micallef Series #4)

by Inger Ash Wolfe

Overview

The new novel in this acclaimed series is brilliantly paced, addictively suspenseful—the author's best yet. Hazel Micallef (played by Susan Sarandon in the recent film of the series' debut, The Calling) has become one of crime writing's most memorable detectives. The Night Bell moves between the past and the present in Port Dundas, Ontario, as two mysteries converge. A discovery of the bones of murdered children is made on land that was once a county foster home. Now it's being developed as a brand new subdivision whose first residents are already railing against broken promises and corruption. But when three of these residents are murdered after the discovery of the children's bones, frustration turns to terror. While trying to stem the panic and solve two crimes at once, Hazel Micallef finds her memory stirred back to the fall of 1959, when the disappearance of a girl from town was blamed on her adopted brother. Although he is long dead, she begins to see the present case as a chance to clear her brother's name, something that drives Hazel beyond her own considerable limits and right into the sights of an angry killer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681772004
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	08/09/2016
Series:	A Detective Hazel Micallef Mystery
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	350,250
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Inger Ash Wolfe is the pseudonym for the American-born Canadian novelist Michael Redhill. He is also the author of The Calling and The Taken.

Editorial Reviews

05/30/2016
The pseudonymous Wolfe’s provocative yet ponderous fourth Hazel Micallef mystery (after 2012’s Door in the River) highlights the mistreatment of those at the margins. After residents of a new housing development in Port Dundas, Ontario, begin finding bones in their yards, the police comb an adjacent field. Behind an old orphanage that abuts it, they discover bones from 18 adolescent boys, all of them murder victims. Meanwhile, an officer is kidnapped, and three people associated with the development are savagely murdered. The Mounties take over the case, displacing Hazel and her team, but the 64-year-old detective inspector remains determined to identify the dead children, rescue her colleague, and bring past and present criminals to justice. Flashbacks to 1957 follow 14-year-old Hazel’s efforts to locate a missing teenager. Factual and thematic ties bind the two story lines and provide the foundation for a sprawling mystery with emotional heft, but Wolfe’s attempts to raise stakes and add a ticking clock render the plot improbable. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Literary. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Wolfe blankets this thriller in an eerie, suspenseful calmness and showcases Hazel as a tenacious, sharply intelligent, reader-courting heroine.

Booklist

A wonderful, creepy, and suspenseful novel with enough twists and compelling characters to make you want to devour it all at one sitting.

Peter Robinson

Wolfe had me from the first page and never let me go. I absolutely loved Hazel Micallef.

Kate Atkinson

An intense new procedural mystery.

New York Times Book Review

In this Canadian cop mystery, the author continues a successful series following Detective Lt. Hazel Micallef through her latest conundrum. This fourth installment in the Detective Micallef story line stands alone nicely but only gets richer as you catch up to the characters’ quirks and nuances from the first three.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

A rare unplug-the-phone, skip-all-meals, ignore-your-bedtime thriller. It's twisty, sharp and very, very creepy—and Detective Hazel Micallef is a perfectly original charmer.

Gillian Flynn

Wolfe blankets this thriller in an eerie, suspenseful calmness and showcases Hazel as a tenacious, sharply intelligent, reader-courting heroine.

Booklist

Praise for the Hazel Micallef series:

   • "A rare unplug-the-phone, skip-all-meals, ignore-your-bedtime thriller. It's twisty, sharp and very, very creepy - and Det. Hazel Micallef is a perfectly original charmer." Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl 

   • "Wolfe had me from the first page and never let me go. I absolutely loved Hazel Micallef." Kate Atkinson

From the Publisher

2016-08-03
In this fourth installment (A Door in the River, 2012, etc.), Ontario police inspector Hazel Micallef becomes intimately involved in a case connecting back to her childhood.The trouble starts with Tournament Acres, a new housing development in Port Dundas that has fallen short of its promises. Unhappy tenants find bones on the empty land intended to become a golf course, and soon DI Micallef is in the office of property manager Brendan Givens. He's being harassed and wants protection, and tenants want something done about the development's failures, but these problems seem like child's play when the bones turn out to be human. Micallef orders the land, which used to belong to the Dublin Home for Boys, to be canvassed. This task yields even more bones, but during the search, an officer goes missing after a threatening voice speaks over his radio. The situation intensifies further when a couple from the development is brutally murdered overnight (in a scene that will give you chills). It becomes clear that something much larger is going on at Tournament Acres, and it goes back decades—Dublin Home has been in ruin for years. The realization that the bones belong to adolescent boys hits Micallef hard, since her brother, Alan, was adopted from a similar home in the 1950s. This takes the narrative back to 1957, when troubled Alan is suspected of foul play when a teenage girl goes missing. To complicate things, Micallef and her friend Gloria Whitman, the daughters of the mayor and the town doctor respectively, are the last to see the girl alive. The two timelines feel like separate stories for most of the book, but you’re safe to suspect that the dots will be connected—though with great haste. Wolfe's main character is alert, hard-bitten, and extremely loyal, and it's a pleasure to get to know her more deeply through her precocious younger self. The pleasure runs out by the final chapters, which read like a chaos of competing sounds; you'll be deafened before the final note. DI Micallef is sure to win your favor, but expect your initial excitement to slowly fizzle out.

Kirkus Review