A simple but engrossing mystery with a New York accent.
A Brooklyn attorney is determined to recover his losses after someone clears out all of his bank accounts in Avitabile’s crime novel.
Al Forte rightly suspects something is amiss when a $40 check he’s written bounces. But he’s unprepared for the news that his bank accounts, both personal and his law office’s, are completely empty. His federally chartered bank isn’t very sympathetic, as there have been instances of lawyers hiding their own funds and claiming identity theft to recoup allegedly stolen capital from the banks. But his bank’s suspicion primarily stems from Al’s association with his paternal cousin, Mick, a (mostly) legit businessman from a mob-affiliated family. However, Mick’s maternal cousin, Eli Ativa, who’s also an attorney, is likely the unwitting culprit. He recently borrowed Al’s laptop, which someone seems to have hacked. As Eli is frustratingly absent and hard to track down, Al searches for clues at the cafe where Eli often works. He eventually learns that a dubious individual with a particular device was indeed in the vicinity of Al’s laptop. Unfortunately, the bank has notified the New York Lawyers’ Fund for Client Protection, which looks into misconduct by attorneys. Now Al and Mick must prove to its grievance committee that someone stole Al’s information when some people still believe he’s a swindler. The second book in the series that began with Occupational Hazard (2018), this installment is a quietly engaging mystery that consists largely of scenes driven by dialogue, as characters discuss who’s behind the theft and how. But there’s abundant tension, as Al faces threats such as imprisonment or disbarment, or both, while Eli’s apparent disappearance is unsettling. The author refers often to the first Al and Mick novel, and one of its characters is a potential suspect in this story’s crime. Readers new to the series will easily follow along, though there are spoilers aplenty. Although Al and Mick are a fascinating pair of polar opposites, Mick’s incessant castigation of his cousin for not heeding warnings of Eli’s untrustworthiness quickly wears thin. Fortunately, Mick’s lawyer, Richie Abbatello, who both helps and encourages Al, is a nice counterbalance.
A simple but engrossing mystery with a New York accent.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73230-632-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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