by AJ Basinski ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 28, 2017
A likable recurring hero fronts a brisk but sometimes-confusing detective story.
A former cop must find the culprit who brutally assaulted his wife in this third installment of a thriller series.
Lt. Mario Morales is head of security on the cruise ship the Mardi Gras. He spends his downtime with his wife of seven months, Sun Li, who’s also a ship employee. One night, Morales awakens in the couple’s cabin to find a masked individual beating Sun Li. The assailant dazes Morales with a blow to the head before escaping, although no passenger sees anyone run from the room. Sun Li’s injuries are so severe that the Coast Guard picks her up for transportation to a trauma hospital. When the ship finally returns to the Miami home port, local police take over the investigation. But they surprisingly arrest Morales and charge him with attempted murder. Morales’ new lawyer, Rick Chopin, gets him out on bail but the ex-cop doesn’t plan on sitting around. Prior to his arrest, he’d surmised the attack had ties to Shanghai Blue, the company where Sun Li once worked, which Morales learned was a front for illicit deeds. He’ll most likely have to head to China if he hopes to identify his wife’s attacker. Basinski (A Reservation for Murder, 2016, etc.) knows how to keep his plot moving. Smoothly transitioning perspectives from Morales and Chopin showcase two distinctive investigations, as the attorney is less assertive than the experienced former cop. The author moreover sets a stellar pace with short chapters and concise dialogue. There’s only a modicum of mystery, although Morales stumbles onto an apparent conspiracy and discovers a shocking secret about Sun Li. But a few elements of the tale are a bit bewildering. For example, at one point, Morales is certain he watches an individual die, only for the character to turn up alive later; it’s not clear, even by the end, how exactly that came about.
A likable recurring hero fronts a brisk but sometimes-confusing detective story.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-981243-14-3
Page Count: 204
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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