Suspenseful yet routine, with oversized bogeymen who seem more menacing than they really are, ethical dilemmas that dissolve...
Joe Pickett’s fantastical 14th pits him against a nest of assassins that just happens to include his old pal Nate Romanowski.
Since Wyoming governor Spencer Rulon got Joe rehired at his old seniority level and with a new raise after he quit the Game and Fish Department after his last run-in with corrupt authority figures (Breaking Point, 2013), Joe’s seriously in his debt. So when Rulon sends him undercover to remote Medicine Wheel County to check out rumors that billionaire hedge fund founder Wolfgang Templeton, who’s retired to Sand Creek Ranch, is heading a murder-for-hire ring whose soldiers seem to include Nate, Joe agrees to go despite his reluctance to leave his family yet again. Nor is he crazy about the cover story that he’s just bringing Medicine Wheel County Game and Fish Warden Jim Latta some pheasants to release into the wild and helping Latta get Templeton’s permission to establish several public walk-in areas in Sand Creek. No sooner has Joe met Templeton and peddled his cover story than he realizes that Sheriff R. C. Mead, Judge Ethan Bartholomew and Latta himself are all protecting poachers like Bill Critchfield and Gene Smith. As the killers continue to take out richly deserving targets—“Go do some good” is their mantra—Joe effortlessly finds ways to get under Latta’s and Templeton’s skin and then struggles to reap the whirlwind. Meanwhile, Joe’s ward, April, takes up with a possible rapist, and his older daughter Sheridan wonders if a creepy loner in her dorm is about to shoot up her campus.
Suspenseful yet routine, with oversized bogeymen who seem more menacing than they really are, ethical dilemmas that dissolve under pressure and an ending that tests your tolerance for coincidence. Below average for this splendid yet checkered series.Pub Date: March 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16076-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
Be warned: It's a stay-up-all-night kind of book. Compulsively readable.
Amy Whey’s sins come back to haunt her when she’s extorted for money by a beautiful stranger in Jackson’s (The Almost Sisters, 2017, etc.) first thriller.
It was supposed to be book club as usual: a group of suburban mothers gathering to talk over a glass of wine or two and then going home to bed. But when new neighbor Angelica Roux shows up at hostess Amy’s door, it doesn’t take long for all hell to break loose. The booze flows freely, and soon the women are engaged in a game: What is the worst thing you did today? This week? This month? In your life? There are many women in the gathering with secrets to protect, but none more than Amy, who, as a teenager, committed a terrible crime that almost destroyed her. Saved by her love for diving, and then by meeting her husband and stepdaughter, Amy has worked hard to build a normal, stable life; she even has a new baby. Angelica has come to threaten all of this; she clearly knows about Amy’s past and will expose her to her loved ones if Amy doesn’t pay her. As Amy tries desperately to outscheme Angelica, she also realizes just how much she has to fight for—and what she might be willing to do to keep her family safe and her secrets buried. Jackson’s novel is chock-full of dramatic reveals and twisty turns, but she paces them out well, dropping them like regularly spaced bombshells. Just when the reader thinks they know what might lie at the heart of the novel, the ground shifts seismically, and the truth removes again to a distance. It’s skillfully done. Amy herself is an openly flawed and relatable character fighting to keep sacred the one thing she values most: her normal, loving, messy life.
Be warned: It's a stay-up-all-night kind of book. Compulsively readable.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-285531-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
Neither story is anywhere near Westlake’s best work, but they still make a terrific tragicomic pair.
Hard Case revives a pair of movie-related novellas originally published under the cryptic title Enough in 1977.
A Travesty, the first and longer of these stories, opens with movie reviewer Carey Thorpe standing over the dead body of actress Laura Penney, the lover with whom his quarrel had suddenly and fatally escalated. Even though her death was technically an accident, Carey, who doesn’t want anyone connecting him with it, immediately begins concealing all indications that he was ever in her apartment. It’s all for naught: Soon he finds himself blackmailed by private detective John Edgarson and having to commit another felony to satisfy his demands. From that point on, his dilemma rapidly spirals into one of the comic nightmares in which Westlake (Brothers Keepers, 1975/2019, etc.) specialized: Moments in which he’s threatened with exposure alternate with long intervals in which NYPD DS Al Bray and especially DS Fred Staples, who’ve decided that he’s innocent, take Carey under their wings, marveling at his ability to solve murders committed by other people; then he caps his transgressions by taking Staples’ wife, Patricia, to bed. The second novella, Ordo, couldn’t be more different. The naval mates of Ordo Tupikos, a deeply ordinary San Diego sailor, tell him that Estelle Anlic, the woman whose marriage to him was annulled years ago when the courts, egged on by her mother, discovered that she was underage, has transformed herself into movie star Dawn Devayne. Against all odds, he manages to reintroduce himself to Estelle, or Dawn, but although her agent plays it as a storybook reunion, Orry just can’t find Estelle in Dawn, who’s changed a lot more than he has, and the tale ends on a note of sad resignation.
Neither story is anywhere near Westlake’s best work, but they still make a terrific tragicomic pair.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78565-720-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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