A bracing page-turner with an unconventional hero.
A woman hires a private eye to find her missing brother—who is in trouble with a ruthless Mexican drug cartel leader—in this novel.
Damian Playa, a disillusioned cartel hit man looking to leave the life, has a simple job: Go to a Las Vegas casino, buy $400,000 worth of chips, place a few skimpy bets at a poker table, and cash out. Failure to do so will mean the gang rape and violent deaths of his mother and girlfriend. But after he wins a couple of bets at the roulette table, even that threat isn’t enough to stop Damian from going all in. Inevitably, he loses it all and disappears. His sister, Araceli, hires private investigator Scott Brody to find him. She describes Damian as “a three-time no-talent loser” and tells Brody she does not want the police informed about the situation. “If Damian’s involved in something dirty, like I suspect, I don’t want the cops finding out about it,” she explains. The investigation, inevitably, is not as cut-and-dried as a mere missing person case. It turns out that Don Gaetano’s Cobalt Green Tide cartel is into some deep state doings, and Brody must grapple with an insidious governmental conspiracy and players with hidden agendas. Brody is an epileptic, which is a unique vulnerability that deftly establishes him as a fighter who refuses to quit while allowing Cassiday to indulge in some tony literary allusions. (Brody frequents a website for those who share his disability and uses the name Myshkin from Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot.) As a scene-setter, Cassiday effectively grabs readers (“Three nuns packing guns under their black habits riding in a silver Range Rover SUV drove up to a small Catholic church” is the gripping book’s opener). The dialogue, though, is a bit hit and miss in this fast-paced tale.
A bracing page-turner with an unconventional hero.Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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