by John Lescroart ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2013
Lots of great scenes shoehorned into a story that seems uncertain how to mix its social commentary and courtroom drama with...
Six years after an impromptu conspiracy locked San Francisco lawyer Dismas Hardy and several of his best buds into a coverup (A Plague of Secrets, 2009), the whole shooting match is threatened when one of the conspirators, Hardy’s brother-in-law, Moses McGuire, is arrested for murder.
Rick Jessup, chief of staff to Liam Goodman of the Board of Supervisors, is quite the ladies’ man, or at least he thinks so. When he visits the massage parlors run by Goodman’s regular contributor Jon Lo, he has enough confidence to leave without paying, sometimes after beating the young women who’ve been keeping him company. The morning after he sleeps with Moses’ daughter Brittany, he obtusely teases her about her sexual experience, and after she walks out, he’s so unwilling to take no for an answer that their next encounter ends with her in the emergency room. So Moses takes it on himself to beat up Jessup and threaten him with worse. When someone kills Jessup two months later, police chief Vi Lapeer, under pressure from Goodman to make an arrest, does an end run around District Attorney Wes Farrell and homicide chief Lt. Abe Glitsky, going directly to two homicide inspectors and a sympathetic judge to sew up the arrest. It’s all politically motivated, just as you’d expect from Lescroart (The Hunter, 2012, etc.). But Hardy’s defense of Moses, his partner in the Little Shamrock Bar, is just as politically implicated, since he and Glitsky and Hardy’s law partner, Gina Roake, all share a compelling personal reason to keep Moses from going back to the bottle or unburdening himself to the cops. A New York cop, placed in the witness protection program so that he can testify against the guys who hired him as a killer, puts just a little more spin on what’s already a dizzyingly complex case.
Lots of great scenes shoehorned into a story that seems uncertain how to mix its social commentary and courtroom drama with the regulars’ continuing soap opera.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-0915-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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