A messy but entertaining crime caper.
In this debut novel, the appearance of old enemies throws a master thief’s heist into jeopardy.
The unusually named Lesson Day runs a successful crew of thieves. It’s mostly a family affair, including his father, Tha Pope; his brother, Learn; and a couple of trusted associates. They’ve pulled off some big jobs in the past, and Lesson has already earned enough money to move his family into a ritzy suburb outside of Detroit. Now, Lesson has his sights on a haul of truly epic proportions: robbing Walmart on Cyber Monday, right at the end of the busiest shopping weekend of the year. Lesson figures that if they do it right, he and his team can walk away with almost $5 million in cash. Such a score would be enough for the crew to leave the high-stakes world of heists behind. Lesson himself has plans for investing in real estate in Detroit’s revitalized downtown. He has mapped out the whole lick down to the last detail: security systems, armored trucks, time windows. But as Tha Pope warns Lesson, no lick ever goes just as planned. While Lesson and the crew are in mid heist, a giant wrench is thrown into the works when two old foes—Savage Keith and Juman—return to town. They’ve been in exile in Ohio ever since they tried to murder Lesson years ago, but they’ve come home to kidnap the thief’s mother, Rocci, and his wife, Ashanti. Can Lesson pull off the heist, save his family, and keep everyone out of jail? It may prove too tall an order for even him. “You wanna start upgrading,” his father warned him before the heist. “But remember this, Lesson, when you upgrade, no matter if you win or lose, you take the team up with you, or down with you.”
In this series opener, Ali creates a vibrant and surprisingly believable world, full of big personalities and lively exchanges of dialogue. The prose is often on the sloppy side, but the author manages to build tension when he needs to: “There was panic in Tha Pope’s voice. Tha Pope was trying to get Lesson’s attention, but Lesson was silent. He saw the truck still sitting in front of the Wal-Mart, but Lesson, Jameer, and Goob were out of his line of sight, and he didn’t have time to maneuver the drone into a better position. He also didn’t want the Wal-Mart security team to see the drone and become suspicious.” There’s a recursive quality to the writing, and Ali manages to repeat nearly every piece of information a few more times than is necessary. Even so, the book is highly readable, leaning into pulpy archetypes and cinematic flourishes to keep things fun. Lesson is a compelling protagonist even when he is doing and saying unfortunate things, and readers will be happy to follow along and see just how he manages to sort it all out. The novel ends in an intriguing place, followed by sample chapters from the forthcoming sequel.
A messy but entertaining crime caper.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73575-090-3
Page Count: 383
Publisher: Master Plan Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tale that’s hard to believe but easy to swallow in a single gulp.
A bear is hunting prey in Wyoming’s Bighorns. And not just any bear.
It’s bad enough that Clay Hutmacher, who manages the Double Diamond Ranch, has lost his son, Clay Jr., to a vicious attack by a grizzly bear. What’s much worse is that Clay Jr.—who’d been about to pop the question to game warden Joe Pickett’s daughter, Sheridan—is only the first of the victims over an exceptionally broad geographical area. Marshal Marvin Bertignolli is clawed and bitten to death over in Hanna. Sgt. Ryan Winner is found bleeding out north of Rawlins. Former Twelve Sleep County prosecutor Dulcie Schalk, one of two survivors of an ambush, doesn’t survive her final encounter. The four experts chosen to kill the grizzly rope Joe into their expedition, but since their quarry keeps turning up far from the last sighting, the most meaningful confrontation the Predator Attack Team has is with a pair of Mama Bears, animal rights activists who demand due process for Tisiphone, as they’ve dubbed the presumed killer. Box, who’s far too canny to leave Tisiphone alone on center stage, follows Joe’s old antagonist Dallas Cates as the ex–rodeo star is released from prison and embarks on his revenge tour, which takes him to Lee Ogburn-Russell, an inventor whose life Dallas saved, and Axel Soledad, a correspondent who shares so many enemies with Dallas that he suggests they go after them together. Franchise fans will appreciate new details about Joe’s complicated family, the obligatory high-country landscapes, and yet another corrupt law enforcer.
A tale that’s hard to believe but easy to swallow in a single gulp.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780593331347
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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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