Readers taken in by Atkins’ sureness of touch in the first half of this schizoid yarn richly deserve to get flimflammed by...
A damsel in distress enlists Boston’s most storied private eye in her cause and then has second and third thoughts.
M. Brooks Welles, if that's his real name, seemed so wonderful. He was a good bit older than Jumpstart administrator Connie Kelly, but that was no problem: Dr. Susan Silverman tells Spenser that Connie’s always been attracted to older men, and Connie confesses it was a rush to be seen with an anti-terrorist pundit who was constantly invited onto talk shows. Now that Welles has stolen her heart and $300,000, though, she wants him to pay. It doesn’t take long for Spenser to track down Johnny Gredoni, the gun shop owner who was Welles’ partner in a land deal that went south, taking Connie’s money with it, or much longer to find out that virtually everything Welles told Connie, from his background at Harvard to the CIA, is a bill of goods. But the ironclad contract Welles had Connie sign would make it nearly impossible for her to sue him even if Spenser could find him. Then, incredibly, Spenser does find him, and it does no good. Welles simply smirks his way back into Connie’s good graces, and she tearfully tells Spenser that his services are no longer required. Spenser goes back to the apartment in the Charlestown Navy Yard he’s called home ever since his old place was torched (Robert B. Parker’s Slow Burn, 2016, etc.), cashes Connie’s check, and tells himself the case is over. Wrong. Act 2 will send Spenser and Hawk to Welles’ old stamping ground, the Greater Faith Ministries of Georgia, for a tussle with gun-running pastors that floats so wildly free of Spenser’s initial investigation that it might have been written by yet another Robert B. Parker wannabe.
Readers taken in by Atkins’ sureness of touch in the first half of this schizoid yarn richly deserve to get flimflammed by the bait-and-switch that follows.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-17700-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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