Next book

PAYBACK IN DEATH

It’s just another day in a near-future landscape filled with dead, dirty cops.

In 2061, Lt. Eve Dallas returns from visiting her husband’s people in Ireland to confront the murder of a man whose entire career had been devoted to making mortal enemies.

Before he retired, Martin Greenleaf was a captain in the New York Police and Security Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau. Day after day he gathered evidence against fellow officers who were taking bribes, attacking criminals with excessive violence, using force against partners who refused to go along with their hooligan methods, working hand in glove with organized crime, or establishing criminal networks of their own. Several of the cops Greenleaf targeted escaped the law by killing themselves, leaving behind vengeful spouses, siblings, and children. Now Greenleaf himself is dead, apparently by his own hand (though it doesn’t take Dallas more than a few minutes to disprove that theory to her satisfaction). Which of the many, many enemies he’d toiled to bring to justice has turned the tables on him for good? The field is so rich that much of this tale is given over to interchangeable interviews by Dallas and Det. Delia Peabody of basically interchangeable suspects. A breakthrough comes when Dallas observes that the manner of Greenleaf’s death closely echoes that of one of those bad cops—and the parallels will thicken as she pursues the case. And a major obstruction presents itself when Det. Joe Lansing of the IAB accuses Dallas of disloyalty to the blue line and launches a violent attack on her himself.

It’s just another day in a near-future landscape filled with dead, dirty cops.

Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023

ISBN: 9781250284099

Page Count: 368

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023

Next book

CLOSE TO DEATH

Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.

What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.

Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.

Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.

Pub Date: April 16, 2024

ISBN: 9780063305649

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024

Next book

DESERT STAR

Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.

A snap of the yo-yo string yanks Harry Bosch out of retirement yet again.

Los Angeles Councilman Jake Pearlman has resurrected the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit in order to reopen the case of his kid sister, Sarah, whose 1994 murder was instantly eclipsed in the press by the O.J. Simpson case when it broke a day later. Since not even a councilor can reconstitute a police unit for a single favored case, Det. Renée Ballard and her mostly volunteer (read: unpaid) crew are expected to reopen some other cold cases as well, giving Bosch a fresh opportunity to gather evidence against Finbar McShane, the crooked manager he’s convinced executed industrial contractor Stephen Gallagher, his wife, and their two children in 2013 and buried them in a single desert grave. The case has haunted Bosch more than any other he failed to close, and he’s fine to work the Pearlman homicide if it’ll give him another crack at McShane. As it turns out, the Pearlman case is considerably more interesting—partly because the break that leads the unit to a surprising new suspect turns out to be both fraught and misleading, partly because identifying the killer is only the beginning of Bosch’s problems. The windup of the Gallagher murders, a testament to sweating every detail and following every lead wherever it goes, is more heartfelt but less wily and dramatic. Fans of the aging detective who fear that he might be mellowing will be happy to hear that “putting him on a team did not make him a team player.”

Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.

Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-316-48565-4

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022

Close Quickview