by Lachlan Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2016
Fans of this estimable series already know that Smith is much better at digging his hero into deep holes than devising...
San Francisco public defender Leo Maxwell just can’t catch a break. In fact, he can’t even cut himself loose from the selfsame villains that have been dogging him through three previous cases (Fox Is Framed, 2015, etc.).
The good news is that Leo and his co-counsel, Jordan Walker, have every chance of getting autistic, schizophrenic, chronic confessor Randall Rodriguez acquitted on the charge of having raped investment banker Janelle Fitzpatrick. The bad news is twofold: Rodriguez doesn’t want to be acquitted—he’d get better care inside prison than outside—and a few hours after Jordan dispatches Leo from her apartment after some sex that’s more than a victory round but less than true love, she's found horribly dead inside. The even worse news, at least from Leo’s point of view, is that the undocumented handgun he’d been given long ago but surrendered to Jordan to dispose of turns out to be the same weapon that murdered Russell Bell in prison. Bell, you may recall, is the former cellmate planning to testify against Lawrence Maxwell, Leo’s father, who was released from prison years after his conviction for killing his wife because criminal mastermind Bo Wilder hired the hit on Bell in order to put Lawrence in his debt. There’s gobs of back story like this, and you need every drop to keep up with the complications Smith keeps piling on as the cops Leo savaged during the Rodriguez trial are faced with the pleasant dilemma of whether to pin Jordan’s murder on him or lean on him until he tells them how he happened to be in possession of the gun whose murderous blast set his father free.
Fans of this estimable series already know that Smith is much better at digging his hero into deep holes than devising plausible explanations for his often dumb behavior or providing clues to the real killer. Newcomers are advised to hang on for one wild ride.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2503-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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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