An often intriguing, if overlong, tale of a cop returning to his old neighborhood.
In Pesare’s debut crime novel, an intelligence officer works with a mobster to try to bring down organized crime in the suburbs of Providence, R.I., and Boston.
Gino Peterson grew up surrounded by criminals in his Providence neighborhood. When his father dies in a car accident, 15-year-old Gino’s mother does everything she can to keep him from falling in with the local gangsters. Much to her delight, he graduates from the police academy in 1974, following in the footsteps of his uncle Earl. Concurrently, mobster Dickie Calderone is brutally murdered and buried in a snowbank in nearby Rehoboth, Mass. Gino becomes obsessed with Calderone’s case, but after years without much traction and a series of career moves, he eventually leaves the mystery behind. That is, until 1982, when his old neighborhood acquaintance (and resident mob underboss) Richard “Moon” Capelli gets convicted on a trumped-up assault charge. Moon calls Gino from prison and delivers an ominous message: “Say hello to my friend Dickie.” Gino is confused; was Dickie, a “made man,” gunned down by Mafia goons? And why is Moon bringing it up now, after all these years? In order to piece the case together, Gino will have to trust the untrustworthy Moon and return to his old stomping grounds; he’ll also have to revisit his father’s death, which he never believed was an accident. The novel follows the classic cops-vs.-mobsters model—the cops are never quite as clean as they seem, and the mobsters never quite as dirty. Although the novel is a bit lengthy, it provides a nice sense of New England atmosphere throughout; characters often refer to the local sports teams—one even comparing Gino to the Boston Bruins’ Bobby Orr—which adds a nice touch of authenticity. The prose is smooth, if not particularly inventive, but it occasionally gets bogged down by clichéd images, such as “Kelly grabbed the wheel until his knuckles turned white.” There are welcome moments of humor, however, as when the narrator notes that Calderone, afraid of police surveillance, played a specific song to drown out Mob-related conversations: Eric Clapton’s cover of Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff.”
An often intriguing, if overlong, tale of a cop returning to his old neighborhood.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463753238
Page Count: 466
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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