A fast-paced detective novel, enhanced by exceptional characters and a striking ending.
A California private eye’s investigation of a questionable suicide leads to a clandestine club and a series of murders in Cassiday’s (Wipeout, 2017, etc.) mystery-thriller.
When horror novelist Bart Dillinger realizes that his girlfriend, Jackie Merced, has been missing without a trace since the previous night, he’s reluctant to call the cops. He fears that they’ll think he’s overreacting; what if she’s just stranded somewhere with a dead cellphone battery? So he hires PI Ethan Carr, who verifies that Jackie is, sadly, dead. Cops recently found her shot to death in a car submerged in the ocean; amazingly, they write it off as suicide, theorizing that she shot herself while simultaneously driving off a cliff. Neither Carr nor Dillinger buy that, so the PI stays on the case. It turns out Jackie belonged to the Russian Club, a secret organization whose membership requires another member’s recommendation. Carr attempts to infiltrate it while also trying to tie Jackie’s death with two other victims, who also died from gunshots to the head. Then he comes home to find human eyeballs nailed to his front door. As if that weren’t enough, someone later tosses a stick of dynamite into his car—while he’s inside it. Brief chapters and short, punchy dialogue give Cassiday’s story a consistently brisk tempo. This is particularly effective during Carr’s rapid-fire interrogations of various people, including his own client. Dillinger, too, is a sensational character; his need to learn what happened to Jackie seemingly, and intriguingly, competes with his yearning for a successful writing career. The possibility that Dillinger might be headed toward a mental collapse later becomes a potent subplot—one that overshadows the main investigation, which becomes stagnant. However, a late introduction of a villainous character ramps up the menace, and the wrap-up of Carr’s case, and the grim coda, are memorable.
A fast-paced detective novel, enhanced by exceptional characters and a striking ending.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5483-0766-0
Page Count: 561
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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