As in Andy’s other recent adventures (Unleashed, 2013, etc.), the mystery is neatly turned, the detection authentic, the...
After taking a dollar to represent a client for an hour, Paterson attorney Andy Carpenter ends up signing on for the tour: multiple murder, a fortune in suspect diamonds, and international terrorism.
The theft of a Shepherd mix named Cheyenne from the rescue shelter Andy runs with his former client Willie Miller might not seem like a big deal, and thanks to Willie’s know-how, they track down the missing dog before midnight. But the case gets red-hot when Cheyenne turns up standing guard over the body of her dognapper, Gerry Downey, who’s been nearly decapitated. The police, with their customary lack of imagination, arrest Tommy Infante, an associate of Downey’s who’d publicly threatened to cut his throat if Downey didn’t turn over his share of the proceeds from a recent jewelry robbery. Convinced that Tommy must know something about the dog, Andy bluffs his way into jail, where he earns a dollar and satisfies himself that Tommy doesn’t know a thing. But when he’s at the point of turning over the case to Deb Kohl, Andy suddenly learns that Cheyenne belonged to Eric Brantley, a brilliant chemist sought by the police for the murder of his business partner, Michael Caruso. Now certain that the dognapping is connected to something bigger, Andy hangs on to the case, and soon enough he’s hanging on for dear life as he’s dragged through a series of expertly choreographed courtroom scenes in which prosecutor Dylan Campbell keeps insisting that this open-and-shut case has nothing to do with the wild schemes Andy and his investigators have uncovered.
As in Andy’s other recent adventures (Unleashed, 2013, etc.), the mystery is neatly turned, the detection authentic, the legal back and forth expertly judged, the wisecracks amusing, and the dog-love stuff nicely modulated. Only the international intrigue fails to catch fire—and a good thing, as Andy would say.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05533-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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