An engaging detective series finale with a superbly animated cast.
An Arizona private eye with a sordid past deals with missing persons and vicious homicides in this last installment of a trilogy.
It seems private investigator Jack Fox’s bed-hopping days are behind him. He’s trying to be a good father to 18-year-old college student Enid, the result of a one-night stand, and baby Katherine. Enid struggles with anger management and trauma from an ordeal in which she was forced to kill in self-defense. She’s on constant, almost paranoid guard, though her unease over Katherine’s mother, Eve Hargrove, makes sense. It hasn’t been that long since Eve escaped from prison, where she had been serving two life sentences for murder. Meanwhile, Jack takes a case for his ex-wife, a dominatrix who’s genuinely worried about her suspiciously absent “best Sub.” This has an unexpected connection to an unsolved murder from a couple of years ago—a homicide that crops up in other detectives’ investigations as well. As these cases clash, there’s a good chance Eve is involved. But whoever it is, someone more than willing to kill has cast Jack, his daughters, and others in a twisted, lethal game. Lewis, as in the earlier series volumes, loads her tale with grim melodrama, which takes precedence over the detective story. Mystery is fleeting; private eyes’ investigations take them either to people who adamantly withhold information or right to a killer’s door. Characters, nevertheless, practically burst with personality; they’re eccentric, flawed, and endlessly intriguing. And though the narrative is dark and sometimes brutally violent, it also flaunts a surprising amount of humor. Jack’s rival, gumshoe Dana Goode, is particularly memorable. She hilariously bickers with her office manager and takes fanatical glee in upsetting Jack. After a bleak but entertainingly over-the-top final act, the novel offers a solid series ending. Still, any of these characters could ignite a worthy spinoff.
An engaging detective series finale with a superbly animated cast.Pub Date: June 6, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 307
Publisher: Cathleen A. McCarthy
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.
The ne’er-do-well son of a successful Irish American family gets dragged into criminal complications that suggest the rest of the Devlins aren’t exactly the upstanding citizens they appear.
The first 35 years in the life of Thomas “TJ” Devlin have been one disappointment after another to his parents, lawyers who founded a prosperous insurance and reinsurance firm, and his more successful siblings, John and Gabby. A longtime alcoholic who’s been unemployable ever since he did time for an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Carrie’s then 2-year-old daughter, TJ is nominally an investigator for Devlin & Devlin, but everyone knows the post is a sinecure. Things change dramatically when golden-boy John tells TJ that he just killed Neil Lemaire, an accountant for D&D client Runstan Electronics. Their speedy return to the murder scene reveals no corpse, so the brothers breathe easier—until Lemaire turns up shot to death in his car. John’s way of avoiding anything that might jeopardize his status as heir apparent to D&D is to throw TJ under the bus, blaming him for everything John himself has done and adding that you can’t trust anything his brother has said since he’s fallen off the wagon. TJ, who’s maintained his sobriety a day at a time for nearly two years, feels outraged, but neither the police investigating the murder nor his nearest and dearest care about his feelings. Forget the forgettable mystery, whose solution will leave you shrugging instead of gasping, and focus on the circular firing squad of the Devlins, and you’ll have a much better time than TJ.
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780525539704
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
