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
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
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
