Another diverting tale with a consistently entertaining duo.
In Robinson’s fourth installment of the Dudley Files detective series, Careless teams up with another Texan sleuth to keep crucial technology from falling into the wrong hands.
After recovering from a serious gunshot wound, Careless finally heads back to his Houston loft with his black mouth cur, Dudley. Surprisingly, Careless has a newfound ability: He can read Dudley’s thoughts when he touches him. This gift works with all dogs, so when Careless and his neighbor/friend/love interest, E.D., find two small dogs on the highway, he knows where to return them. Careless befriends the dogs’ owner, Kinky Friedman—yes, that Kinky Friedman—and the two men are soon on a case together. An apparent robbery and a dead body at an art gallery ultimately lead the sleuths to an important microchip. People, and entire countries, crave this chip; apparently, it’s an effective defense against missiles. Believing Careless and Kinky have it, individuals and agencies surveil them and ransack their homes. Baddies even track Careless as far as Israel, a trip he takes with E.D. for her photojournalism assignment. Using his special link to dogs, Careless will hopefully find the chip before nefarious agents do. Robinson’s novel, like preceding installments, is breezy and unrelentingly irreverent. Though Careless and Kinky are similar characters, their ongoing shtick is funny and engaging. Careless, for example, seems confused by Kinky’s expression, “checkup from the neck up,” despite Careless’ own “felt up from the belt up.” The mystery largely revolves around who has the microchip. While Careless’ telepathic link to four-legged characters is an odd quasi-supernatural inclusion, it highlights Dudley’s import, particularly his amazing sniffer. The book includes a foreword by Kinky Friedman and Kinky Friedman song lyrics.
Another diverting tale with a consistently entertaining duo.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Golden Hound Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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