A satisfying read with plenty of bad guys and a solid, well-defined heroine.
Emilia Cruz Encinos is back for her fourth outing as Acapulco’s only female detective, once again confronting institutionalized corruption while trying to solve a string of murders.
Amato (Diablo Nights, 2014, etc.) skillfully juxtaposes the Mexican city of Acapulco’s glittering, wealthy enclaves with its seamy, violent underbelly. Emilia inhabits both worlds, albeit uncomfortably: she hails from the poor side of town but now lives in a lavish penthouse suite with her American boyfriend, Kurt Rucker, the general manager of the Palacio Réal hotel. Their evolving, and occasionally devolving, relationship runs throughout the series. This installment opens with the city’s police department reeling from the execution-style killings of three high-ranking law enforcement officials, which the press has labeled “the El Trio murders.” By the end of the first chapter, the wife of senior detective Franco Silvio is shot. But is this an attempted fourth El Trio killing, a byproduct of Silvio’s own illegal bookie operation, or a case of domestic violence? Meanwhile, the glamorous mayor of Acapulco, Carlota Montoya Perez, improbably decides to deal with the spate of recent violence by forming an all-female auxiliary unit—Las Palomas (“the doves of peace”), dedicated to creating an aura of calm in the tourist areas. Emilia, much to her displeasure, is transferred out of the detective squad and tasked with selecting and readying a troop of untrained recruits. Amato weaves an intricate assortment of themes into a vivid tapestry that depicts both the beauty and ugliness of Acapulco. Her attention to clothing, food, and other details of the cityscape brings life to her characters. In one memorable moment, for example, Emilia encounters a band of young street boys with plastic soda bottles hanging around their necks, just below their chins; the bottles are filled with glue, which the boys sniff throughout the day: “The high from the glue cut hunger pangs and diluted the misery and loneliness of being homeless in a combat zone.” There’s as much dialogue and pondering as there is action in this novel, but the investigative pace holds steady, with danger and betrayal never more than a few pages away.
A satisfying read with plenty of bad guys and a solid, well-defined heroine.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5374-3328-8
Page Count: 364
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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