Fans of hard-boiled detective fiction may not be impressed, but there’s soft-boiled satisfaction to the departmental...
Relegated to busting cops for soliciting sex, Sergeant Mike Turner (Internal Affairs, 2009) finally gets a case with real promise—a renegade cop on dubious disability linked to illegal guns and armed robbery.
The investigation broadens, uncovering a militia-like clan of thugs involved in contract killings and random violence. There’s nothing Turner hates more than abuse of the shield, and he’ll use every asset—his good looks, keen observational skills, uncanny instinct—to get closer to perpetrators, in this case using Beverly Conner, the suspect’s attractive mother, a barmaid at a law-enforcement watering hole. Turner’s magnetism proves as much curse as boon. He’s lonely, sure, and this thing that’s started back up between him and Miriam, his on-again/off-again, doesn’t sit well, especially when she moves in and begins to clutter up his apartment. But when the suspect’s mom falls for him, routine undercover work heats up. Worse still, turns out Miriam’s been involved with the primary suspect, putting her loyalty in question. The investigation expands but, almost as quickly, a botched bust meant to generate leads on two cops who’ve gone on the lam jeopardizes the careers of Turner and his fellow investigators. As if his professional and love lives aren’t stressful enough, lack of separation between the two is going to put him in his grave. His neighbor, a senior ex-cop who walks Turner’s dog and doles out love advice, faces relocation to a retirement home at the behest of his son, a police commander. This sets Turner at odds with a superior and gets him an unlikely housemate. Meanwhile, his partners—the apocryphal Reggie, constantly filling notebooks which Turner would love to get his hands on, and the volatile Miller, prone to act before he thinks—are a source of concern in a close-knit department where a concealed identity risks exposure and death at every step. Suspects disappear. Alleged conspirators turn up dead. The circle of corruption and murder expands beyond the Los Angeles city limits. Ultimately, Turner’s Achilles heel is his heart. Surrounded by perverts and sycophants, he wants to make things right for his neighbor, for the woman in his life and for the victims of escalating, senseless violence, but the bad guys are too close to the people close to his heart. His pursuit of these wolves in sheep’s clothing goes beyond the thin blue line of duty.
Fans of hard-boiled detective fiction may not be impressed, but there’s soft-boiled satisfaction to the departmental intrigue and the meting out of justice, Sergeant Turner–style.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-57962-200-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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