A sometimes-intriguing but often convoluted whodunit.
After witnessing the prelude to a young woman’s murder, an assemblyman’s chief of staff gets caught up in an investigation in Ziman’s tense political novel.
New York City politico Ryan McNeil witnesses state legislators debate the death penalty, and his boss, Assemblyman Nickolas Somatos, reads out Ryan’s impassioned speech against it. Out on the street, Ryan sees Kathy Wilet enter a limousine; readers find out that her boyfriend murdered her with a golf club not long afterward, after they discussed some secret files. As part of an investigation into her disappearance, Ryan gives his witness statement to a police detective, who’s skeptical about Ryan’s timeline of events. Ryan’s girlfriend, Caroline Tierney,works at a law office in a support capacity, and they both embark on a hunt for the truth. As Ryan digs further into Kathy’s past, his actions prompt the governor to deem him a person of interest. Sometime later, Ryan marries Annie McNeil and moves to Washington, D.C., to work for Somatos, who’s become a member of Congress. Back in New York, Caroline continues to probe financial leads in her investigation, which leads her to an arsonist and some very bad actors in the governor’s office. It all ends with multiple unexpected deaths of major characters. At times over the course of the narrative Ziman’s writing style reveals some distracting quirks, as when he introduces his characters fragmentarily, with details about their names, dispositions, and bodily features separated by pages at a time. The author also has a tendency to veer into passive sentence constructions (“A dinner of shrimp, mussels and pasta had been consumed”) and to haphazardly switch between past and present tense, which can be distracting. In addition, some aspects of the plot add unnecessary complexity. That said, the pace of the story is consistently propulsive throughout, which is sure to maintain readers’ interest.
A sometimes-intriguing but often convoluted whodunit.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2021
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
Slippery suspects and evildoers among the usually private and quiet Amish.
A series of brutal murders rocks the quiet community of Painters Mill, Ohio.
A young Amish girl playing hide-and-seek in a brushy area near a creek finds dismembered body parts. The early years of police Chief Kate Burkholder, who grew up Amish and has come to terms with leaving that life behind, give her insight into crimes committed in her county, which has a large Amish population. Although there’s always some crime among the Amish, something about the killing and dismemberment of landscaper and nursery owner Samuel Yutzy has a big-city feel. Kate’s husband, John Tomasetti, is an agent with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation who provides the services small-town police departments lack. Kate and John knew Samuel, and when they check his place of business, they find a dehydrated buggy horse and a lot of blood. Samuel’s parents admit that he had a wild rumspringa—a period when Amish youth try out the secular world before committing to the church—which included a girlfriend and some shifty non-Amish men, but say that he’d recently returned to the fold. A picture of the girlfriend leads them to a gentlemen’s club, and his parents reveal that he was being sued by someone over a landscape job gone wrong. When Kate tries to find Samuel’s best friend, Aaron Shetler, she learns that he’s been missing from work, and soon his body is found stuffed in a drum. Searching for the girlfriend gets Kate drugged and warned to drop the case. Never one to give up, she discovers a tangled web of deceit and a link to human trafficking that just may be the death of her.
Slippery suspects and evildoers among the usually private and quiet Amish.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781250781147
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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