by Ace Atkins ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 18, 2017
Beneath the down-home Southern trappings, fans will find Atkins’ customary mixture of political corruption, true-blue...
Reluctantly back in the saddle as the sheriff of Tibbehah County, Mississippi, Quinn Colson goes up against a trio of bank robbers as cunning as they are clueless.
Rick Wilcox, Jonas Cord (who’s borrowed his name from that of a notorious Harold Robbins hero), and their buddy Opie have robbery down to a science. They know exactly the best time to move on even modest institutions like the Jericho First National Bank, and they perform each job with military precision. While Cord waits in a disposable stolen truck, the other two enter each target armed with a stopwatch, a pair of assault rifles, two Donald Trump masks, and an unforgettable tagline: “Anyone moves and I’ll grab ‘em by the pussy.” No one generally moves, and the former Marines and their junior partner drive off, ditch their ride and set it afire, and then take off to plot their next caper. Now that they’ve fouled his nest, Quinn would love to catch them, but he and his deputies have their hands full with the disappearance of teenagers Tamika Odum and Ana Maria Mata, county supervisor Skinner’s endless complaints against Vienna’s Place, the strip club Fannie Hathcock runs just outside the city limits, and the trashing of Maggie Powers’ house by somebody, presumably her estranged husband, who didn’t even bother to steal anything. This last crime would barely register on Quinn’s radar if Maggie weren’t a well-nigh forgotten friend he spent summers playing with as a child, an old acquaintance with whom his friendship might well blossom into something else. In between shared meals of catfish and whiskey, though, Quinn keeps being drawn back to Vienna’s Place—and so, it turns out, do the robbers he’s pursuing.
Beneath the down-home Southern trappings, fans will find Atkins’ customary mixture of political corruption, true-blue policing, intimate betrayals, and wholesale violence. The satisfyingly inconclusive ending of this sequel to the equally dark The Innocents (2016) puts a whole new spin on catharsis.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-57671-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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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