Less funny and more deeply felt than Carter’s first five cases (The Player, 2014, etc.): reliable entertainment that’ll make...
A series of not-so-random carjackings investigated by Newark Eagle-Examiner reporter Carter Ross ends up as a race between the paddy wagon, the shotgun, and the stork.
Carjacking is so deeply ingrained in Newark culture that the locals have developed a tactic called “the Newark Cruise”—not quite stopping at red lights after dark—to avoid it. When banking executive Kevin Tiemeyer gets shot for his Rolex during what should have been a routine carjacking, however, it gets the attention of Tina Thompson, the Eagle-Examiner’s managing editor for local news. And when she sics Carter, father of the baby she’s about to deliver, on the story, he quickly connects it to the remarkably similar carjacking of Nigerian-born businessman Joseph Okeke two weeks earlier. Both men were shot after surrendering their cars, and the two of them, Carter learns with a little digging, had golfed together at the Fanwood Country Club. Naturally, Earl Karlinsky, the Fanwood’s general manager, doesn’t take kindly to Carter’s accusations that Karlinsky himself is setting up his members to be victimized, and Fanwood board member Armando "Doc" Fierro, the fixer’s fixer, succeeds in getting Carter suspended after he crosses the fine line from aggressive journalism to unauthorized spying. But Carter, who’s convinced himself that Dave Gilbert, the director of Chariots for Children, is not only an ex-con, but the head of a thriving chop shop, won’t let go—even though the person who’ll pay the heaviest price for his snooping is his pregnant girlfriend.
Less funny and more deeply felt than Carter’s first five cases (The Player, 2014, etc.): reliable entertainment that’ll make you think twice about your next trip to Newark.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06440-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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