Fans of local color and eccentric characters won’t be disappointed.
Colorful characters populate Stephens’ (Nature of Evil, 2012) murder mystery set in a tropical paradise.
Hapless hero and first-person narrator Edgar Allen “Poe” Rutherford has a life in shambles. He flees to Maui for some desperately needed R&R at the invitation of his lifelong friend, Doug Foxx. The destination is Lahaina, an old seaside town with a thriving artist colony. The town should be idyllic, but it’s a vipers’ nest: Everyone seems to have a tangled past, and all the artists hate one another. No one is more hated than the most successful artist, Doug’s girlfriend, Lauren, who has superior talent but no original ideas, so she steals other artists’ ideas and outdoes the originator. Early on, though, Lauren is stabbed to death, and Doug is caught red-handed. He flees the scene with Lauren’s blood all over his clothes, and to make matters worse, the two had been arguing heatedly just before she stomped out of an art show. Despite the overwhelming evidence, did Doug actually murder his girlfriend? Poe intends to find the real killer and set his old friend free. Enter Poe’s love interest: Detective Alana Hu of the LPD. Things get off on the wrong foot for Alana and Poe and their uneasy relationship, but love sneaks up on them both. The rest of the cast fills out nicely: Nick James, who was planning to sue Lauren for the theft of his ideas; Xavier, “the pharaoh,” who channels Egyptian royalty while living in the pyramid he built; William Kelly, sculptor, who lives with a bimbo in a treehouse; and Bernard Henderson, photographer and terminal alcoholic—all have their reasons to want Lauren dead. How many islanders will die before Poe figures things out? This being Stephen’s second mystery, the promising talent shows his inexperience at times. The dialogue doesn’t really crackle, and Poe can be overly chummy with readers. At one point, he treads water out at sea—with a shoulder wound—for 10 hours. For the most part, though, the straightforward plot moves along briskly toward a conclusion that is impressively ingenious and surprising.
Fans of local color and eccentric characters won’t be disappointed.Pub Date: June 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1470090586
Page Count: 208
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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