It's a wonder Florida hasn't yet banished Hiaasen (Native Tongue, etc.). Here's the Miami Herald reporter's fifth comic thriller—a marvelous madcap yarn pitting a stripper vs. a congressman—depicting the Sunshine State as the weirdest place this side of Oz. And the most venal as well: Hiaasen's satire is more barbed than ever here, pricking at Florida's apparently corrupt sugar industry. The typically bizarre action begins at Fort Lauderdale's Eager Beaver club, where a drunk fan is pawing star stripper Erin Grant. Out of the audience rushes an old gent who clubs the mauler with a bottle of Korbel. No big deal—except that the white knight is Congressman David Dilbeck, toady to sugar interests and up for reelection. Two men try to blackmail Dilbeck: one, a lovestruck fan of Erin's, wants the congressman to help reverse the judicial decision that granted custody of Erin's daughter to her psycho husband, Darrell; the other, a sleazy lawyer, wants money. Both wind up dead, victims of the sugar-growers' long and homicidal arm. Meanwhile, warfare erupts between the Eager Beaver and the rival Flesh Farm, and not even the Beaver's new attraction—patrons wrestling strippers in a vat of creamed corn—can stem the tide of customers to the Farm and it's "friction" dancing. In any case, Erin won't do corn, so—desperate for money to run away with her daughter, whom she's snatched from Darrell—she turns to dancing privately for the slobbering congressman. But now Darrell's hot on her trail, rusty knife in hand, and it takes all of Erin's wiles, plus some help from a kindly Cuban cop and the Eager Beaver's bald giant of a bouncer, to keep Darrell off her back and Dilbeck out of her pants—and bring justice to the sugar industry as well. Prime Hiaasen, and with a new edge: sexier, more violent, more political, but just as funny.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1993
ISBN: 044669567X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1993
Compelling characters and a sexy, angst-filled bunch of mysteries add up to a winning series debut.
After ending the long-running Grim Reaper series (Summoned to Thirteenth Grave, 2019, etc.), Jones introduces a sexy, funny, tough new heroine in Sunshine Vicram, the police chief of Del Sol, New Mexico.
Sun fled her hometown years before after the horrifying experience of being kidnapped when she was 17—an experience she doesn’t talk about, though it’s never out of her mind. After becoming a police officer, she worked most recently only half an hour away in Santa Fe before her parents nominated her for chief without telling her. Now that she and her 14-year-old daughter, Auri, have settled into a cottage in her parents’ backyard, she lands a case that brings back all her worst fears and cracks open suppressed memories. Auri’s first day at school is blighted by mean girls and rumors that identify her as a police snitch. The best part of her day is meeting heart-stopping Cruz De los Santos, a talented poet who’s the coolest guy in school. Del Sol has a reputation as a place where weird things happen, but the toughest ordeal for Sun is seeing the man she’s loved forever. Levi Ravinder, owner of Dark River Shine distillery, is the successful member of a dysfunctional, crime-ridden family. At first he responds to her coolly, but the atmosphere between them is combustible. Then Marianna St. Aubin literally crashes into the police station to report the kidnapping of her daughter, Sybil. For years Sybil told her parents about dreams that she’d be taken and killed before her 15th birthday, but they never believed her. A desperate hunt for Sybil and Levi’s nephew, Jimmy, who has autism and is also missing, reveals the long-dead body of Levi’s uncle and the shack Sun suddenly realizes she was kept in after her abduction. Both Sun and Auri must fight to overcome the dangerous secrets that spring up from nowhere.
Compelling characters and a sexy, angst-filled bunch of mysteries add up to a winning series debut.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-14944-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Middling for this standout series but guaranteed to please anyone who thinks the cops sometimes get it wrong.
A cold case pulls Harry Bosch back from retirement and into another eventful partnership with Detective Renée Ballard of the LAPD.
The widow of Bosch’s retired mentor, Detective John Jack Thompson, has a present for Bosch, and it’s a doozy: the murder book for the unsolved killing of ex-con John Hilton, shot to death in his car one night nearly 20 years ago, which Thompson swiped from the archives without authorization or explanation. Bosch, who wonders why Thompson lifted the murder book if he didn’t intend to work the case, is eager to take a crack at it himself, but he needs the resources that only an active partner can provide. But Ballard, settled into the routine of the midnight shift after her exile from Robbery-Homicide (Dark Sacred Night, 2018), has just started working her own case, the arson that killed Eddie, a homeless man, inside his tent. As if that’s not enough criminal activity, Bosch’s half brother, Lincoln lawyer Mickey Haller, faces the apparently hopeless defense of Jeffrey Herstadt, who not only left his DNA under the fingernail of Walter Montgomery, the Superior Court judge he’s accused of killing, but also obligingly confessed to the murder. Working sometimes in tandem, more often separately, and sometimes actively against the cops who naturally bridle at the suggestion that any of their own theories or arrests might be flawed, Ballard and Bosch slog through the usual dead ends and fruitless rounds of questioning to link two murders separated by many years to a single hired killer. The most mysterious question of all—why did John Jack Thompson steal that murder book in the first place?—is answered suddenly, casually, and surprisingly.
Middling for this standout series but guaranteed to please anyone who thinks the cops sometimes get it wrong.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-48561-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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