The ideal mix of the personal, the political, the puzzling and the Parisian make Aimée’s latest a perfect pleasure.
Murder strikes close to home when Aimée Leduc (Murder in Palais Royal, 2009, etc.) finds her godfather charged with a crime passionelle.
“Something’s going on with Xavierre,” Commissaire Morbier tells his goddaughter. So while he’s off in Lyon on a case, Aimée and her partner René Friant crash the wedding rehearsal for Xavierre’s daughter at her upscale townhome in Passy. They find the mother of the bride frazzled, and no wonder. Within minutes, Xavierre is lying in the garden dead, leaving her daughter Irati hysterical in the arms of Robbé, her fiancé. Still worse, the police arrest Morbier, clapping him in a cell with Cheb DJ, a violent felon Morbier’s locked up many times. While DJ tries to win his release by beating information out of his cellmate, Aimée looks for clues near Place Victor Hugo, starting with the studio of Agustino, a painter who knew fellow Basque Xavierre from their school days in Bayonne. Irati too seems mixed up in the culture wars, as Aimée concludes when she finds a pamphlet from the separatist group Euskadi Action in her mail. Now that the results of the long-awaited Basque referendum are to be announced at the Marmottan Museum, will the nationalists give sabotage a rest? More murders, the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, and a frantic message from Agustino convince Aimée that Xavierre’s death has more to do with politics than passion.
The ideal mix of the personal, the political, the puzzling and the Parisian make Aimée’s latest a perfect pleasure.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56947-882-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
A worthwhile thriller and a valuable exposé.
A CIA coverup slowly unravels.
In 1953, Dr. Charles Wilson either jumped or fell from a window of the Hotel Harrington. In 1975, at a Senate hearing, it was publicly revealed that he had been subjected to a CIA experiment involving LSD, but the fact that he had been a CIA employee and the details of his work for the agency went undiscovered. Internal records of the death were missing, and the director, himself unaware of the actual circumstances of Wilson's death, asks Jack Gabriel to investigate and report the real story if he can. Gabriel knew Wilson and that he worked in the germ warfare laboratories, and from that starting point he begins to explore the questions surrounding Wilson's death. As he works, potential witnesses die "accidentally," avenues of inquiry dry up, and a substantial coverup becomes apparent. Then an anonymous source offers a few tips, and Gabriel begins to understand the true extent of the CIA's crime: They murdered one of their own. There remain questions, though, and in the process of trying to assess who and why, Gabriel's own life becomes perilous. Overall, the novel's pace is a little slow and the plot one-dimensional, but the characters of Gabriel and his family and of Wilson's surviving family are vivid and sympathetic. Vidich (The Good Assassin, 2017, etc.) acknowledges that his novel is based on the story of Frank Olson, who "fell or jumped" from a New York City hotel room in November 1953, and fidelity to historical fact may account for the pace and plotting. But this fidelity also reveals a shameful instance of postwar conduct and the arrogance of the powerful.
A worthwhile thriller and a valuable exposé.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-335-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Big, brooding debut police thriller by Los Angeles Times crime-reporter Connelly, whose labyrinthine tale of a cop tracking vicious bank-robbers sparks and smolders but never quite catches fire. Connelly shows off his deep knowledge of cop procedure right away, expertly detailing the painstaking examination by LAPD homicide detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch of the death-scene of sometime junkie Billy Meadows, whom Bosch knew as a fellow "tunnel rat" in Vietnam and who's now o.d.'d in an abandoned water tunnel. Pushing Meadows's death as murder while his colleagues see it as accidental, Bosch, already a black sheep for his vigilante-like ways, further alienates police brass and is soon shadowed by two nastily clownish Internal Affairs cops wherever he goes—even to FBI headquarters, which Bosch storms after he learns that the Bureau had investigated him for a tunnel-engineered bank robbery that Meadows is implicated in. Assigned to work with beautiful, blond FBI agent Eleanor Wish, who soon shares his bed in an edgy alliance, Bosch comes to suspect that the robbers killed Meadows because the vet pawned some of the loot, and that their subsequent killing of the only witness to the Meadows slaying points to a turned cop. But who? Before Bosch can find out, a trace on the bank-robbery victims points him toward a fortune in smuggled diamonds and the likelihood of a second heist—leading to the blundering death of the IAD cops, the unveiling of one bad cop, an anticipated but too-brief climax in the L.A. sewer tunnels, and, in a twisty anticlimax, the revelation of a second rotten law officer. Swift and sure, with sharp characterizations, but at heart really a tightly wrapped package of cop-thriller cliches, from the hero's Dirty Harry persona to the venal brass, the mad-dog IAD cops, and the not-so-surprising villains. Still, Connelly knows his turf and perhaps he'll map it more freshly next time out.
Pub Date: Jan. 21, 1992
ISBN: 0-316-15361-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1991
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