by Andrea Camilleri ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 2, 2018
The usual humor and strong personalities we expect from Camilleri will be missed by fans in this book, but the more...
When a construction company’s senior accountant is found dead on a work site, Inspector Montalbano can’t shake the feeling that the murdered man was trying to send a message.
The rain has been so relentless in Montalbano’s part of Sicily that construction sites across the area have been closed. But when a body is found at a site near Sicudiana, Montalbano must trudge through the mud to see where this man—who turns out to be Giugiù Nicotra, senior accountant—died. His body is discovered inside a large pipe, part of a new water main, but evidence suggests that he was shot elsewhere before making his way here. But why? As Montalbano and his team search for information on Nicotra, they put together a frustrating picture of work stoppages, phony inspections, and highly inflated prices for materials, an example of a broken system with which Montalbano is all too familiar. Distractions pile up as the team gets closer to finding the motive for murder, but the fishiness is immediately apparent—even the prosecutor, Jacono, admits that things aren’t adding up. When Montalbano realizes he’s “still at the opening lines of a play they want to put on,” he uses it to his advantage, quietly homing in on the guilty party as they start to believe they’re free. In this 22nd installment, Camilleri (A Nest of Vipers, 2017, etc.) shows us a more introspective and self-aware inspector, capable of questioning his own abilities, who steadfastly makes it to the bottom of this orchestrated crime with the calmness of a man who has already seen it all. From start to finish, the image of Nicotra in the pipe haunts the inspector, who keeps close to his chest the feeling that “the truth of [his] death is to be found here.”
The usual humor and strong personalities we expect from Camilleri will be missed by fans in this book, but the more intricate portrait of the detective will make the pages turn anyway.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-14-312808-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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by Andrea Camilleri ; translated by Stephen Sartarelli
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by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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