A stunning, pistol-packing hero who deserves a more believable mystery.
Murder, robbery, and a long-legged employee shake up a Florida bank’s loan division.
In Madding’s murder mystery, loan processor Colleen Smithwick packs a pistol, wears stilettos, drives a Maserati, and finds married life boring. Alex, her devoted husband of 15 years, seems glued to his recliner. So when Colleen and police detective Gary Black meet-cute when he investigates the murder of one of the bank’s loan officers, she soon sends the handsome, blond, divorced man racy selfies, including one of her dragon-tattooed upper thigh (plus just a hint of a black thong). The stabbing death of loan officer Richard Shiver in the bank’s parking lot hardly bothers Colleen, who tells Gary that she’s on a long list of murder suspects, which includes anyone who ever had to deal with the victim. Within days of the killing, a robbery takes place at the bank, and then another employee is found dead. But work on approving loans basically goes on uninterrupted, and Colleen balances her pull to Gary with an attraction to a female co-worker. Realism doesn’t play a part in a plot that has loan operations go on as if it were business as usual even when the bank suffers a robbery and multiple employee murders within a matter of days. Details and word choices deserve more attention. For example, Colleen has “salt and pepper streaked brown hair” (brown?), and it’s not a quip when someone asks “ ‘What’s the status of my loan package?’ he quipped.” A pet dachshund is introduced early in the book, but later a Chihuahua confusingly appears. Gary is not a particularly woke character; he orders a drink for himself and one for Colleen by saying, “And the lady will have the same.” But this lady, who tells Gary she fantasizes about spankings, is a vamp. And when she’s on the page, it’s eye-popping for readers.
A stunning, pistol-packing hero who deserves a more believable mystery.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-578-86037-4
Page Count: 85
Publisher: Charm House Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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