Readers who like their crime novels hard-boiled may find this a bit too soft.
A young Chicago detective tackles his first homicide case in Kelly’s series debut.
After a year of trying, 29-year-old police officer Jack Fallon finally receives a transfer to the homicide division. He has a new partner: Elaina Rodriguez, a married U.S. Army veteran. After three sex workers are murdered, Jack and Elaina’s subsequent investigation leads them to Wisconsinite Richard Kotler, a “frequent flyer with escorts” who is seen on security footage having drinks with one of the victims. An anonymous tipster claims to know a group of women that he thinks might be at risk from someone killing Chicago sex workers. Is he legitimate, or is he the maniacal killer, trying to, in Elaina’s words, “insert himself into the investigation?” Meanwhile, Fallon finds himself the target of a gang of muggers who had been preying on pedestrians until Fallon, used as bait in an exciting opening scene, foiled them. One promising development in his lovelorn life is his introduction to Emma Merlin, a beautiful but elusive standup comedian and artist (“I’m here when I’m here, you will have to find me,” she tells him). At less than 130 pages, the novel is a quick read, but for a detective story set in Chicago, this series-starter is a walk on the mild side. Fallon is a young, confident character, which is refreshing in this gritty genre, but he’s also quite bland. (The only conflict he has with his new partner is that she is a White Sox fan and he is a diehard Cubs fan.) Several of Elmore Leonard’s iconic rules for writing are violated: “Never start a book with the weather,” “Don’t go into great detail describing places and things,” “Never use the words ‘suddenly’ or ‘all hell broke loose.’” Fallon’s granularly detailed movements around Chicago at times take on the tenor of the Saturday Night Livesketch “The Californians” (“I walked up North Clarendon Avenue to Lawrence Avenue crossed the street and turned left to walk west on Lawrence.”)
Readers who like their crime novels hard-boiled may find this a bit too soft.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2024
ISBN: 9798330337798
Page Count: 134
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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