A first novel sure to make the bestseller lists.
Nick Meehan is the job, the quintessential New York City PD detective, also one who’s ironic and self-contained, intelligent and driven. And troubled.
Meehan and his new partner, the hard-charging Esposito, are dispatched to investigate an apparent suicide in Inwood Hill Park. Meehan has been granted a preferred assignment, but only by accepting a troubling caveat. Meehan is to report on Esposito for the Internal Affairs Bureau. No cop likes a rat, and Meehan doesn't need the IAB's pressure added to worries about a failing marriage and a frail father. At the scene, the detectives confront Ivan Lopez, who reported the body, but his story is shaky, and Meehan is troubled. The next call takes the partners to the scene of a shooting. The victim has been murdered with a shotgun, leading to an incorrect identification. It's not Malcolm Cole, drug dealer and possible killer. It's his brother. Now the detectives are caught between Cole and a Dominican gang with major ambitions. With the pensive and self-aware Meehan doubting his own judgment, Esposito leads the way though a series of maneuvers, some legal, some not, and many skirting department rules, that land the pair in a gun battle at a Dominican gang funeral and then at a clandestine meeting with Cole at which a rogue IAB agent appears. Meanwhile, Ivan Lopez dogs Meehan, wanting help with his teenage daughter, Grace, either the victim of a gang rape or a participant in an orgy. Conlon (Blue Blood, 2004) is a gifted writer, surefooted on this terrain, drawing on personal NYPD experience to immerse the reader in the job, a milieu far more gritty and less glamorous than the car chases that pass for police work on screen. Meehan is a powerful character, realistic in his wry, existentialist approach and deeply sympathetic in his relationship with his wife and with Daysi, a Dominican florist, who may represent a second chance.
A first novel sure to make the bestseller lists.Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-51917-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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