An intriguing and enjoyable game of cat and mouse that involves catching a killer.
In this World War II novel, a cryptic message left on the body of a murder victim in 1942 San Francisco focuses the FBI’s attention on a small group of German sympathizers funded by the Nazi regime.
The body of Charles Brown, former president of the local “America First Committee,” is found in his Hatzfeld Enterprises office. On his corpse is a handwritten sign that reads “Traitor.” Below that are the words “The Grynszpan Group.” The police chief has brought in his go-to investigator for national security matters, former San Francisco Police Commissioner Tony Bosco. DS Dennis Sullivan, who worked with Tony on an earlier case, explains the Grynszpan allusion, which references a young, disgruntled Polish Jewish loner who, in 1938, killed a German Parisian Embassy official. Is this the work of Jewish terrorists? The second member of Tony’s team, Ruthie Fuller, says they must consult with her friend Jacob Weiss, an FBI agent handling Nazi, Fascist, and Communist subversion cases. In a compelling narrative side trip, Issel takes readers back to 1938 to build the poignant backstory for Jacob, the novel’s complex and conflicted lead character. Born in San Francisco, Jacob was raised in Vienna and then relocated to Palestine with his parents and sister after the rise of Hitler. Two years later, his family was murdered by an Arab terrorist in a tragedy that sets the course of the teenager’s life. He joined Capt. Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squad, a contingent of Jewish soldiers recruited to protect Jewish settlers, and Jacob’s experience in the group ultimately led him back to the city of his birth. The author, a history scholar, lays out a vivid, disturbing portrait of San Francisco just entering the war, a city terrified of foreign attacks; rife with antisemitism, racial bigotry, and ethnic discrimination; and politically and socially roiled by anti-immigrant fervor. But his mixture of history, well-paced action scenes, and an entertaining investigation of a series of mysterious murders occasionally becomes subsumed by superficial on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand conversations among the central Jewish characters about Zionism. This is a curious debate given their knowledge, albeit rudimentary, of what is already befalling European Jews.
An intriguing and enjoyable game of cat and mouse that involves catching a killer.Pub Date: May 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-926664-75-3
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Carleton Street Publications
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2022
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
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