Credulity issues aside, this thrilling adventure ride plunges into art crimes, job competition, and greed.
An exasperated executive dips to unconscionable levels to settle a rivalry between dueling co-workers in this novel.
It’s 2008, and John Little, an arrogant, pot-smoking, middle-aged New Jersey restaurateur with a high art fetish and a bad back, gets aggravated by two squabbling subordinates who approach him about their belligerent working relationship. Intensely uninterested in being a human resources referee, John decides to recruit portly, 30-something Philip and tall, lean, 40-something gambler Rick in a competition to decide the fate of their employment. Sutherland creates tension right from the opening pages as the unscrupulous boss sends his embattled employees on the mission of their lives, pandering to his love of rare art and making his workers pawns in a deadly game of international intrigue. The task at hand involves both men committing separate art thefts on a grand scale in a global dual heist of Dutch portrait artist Frans Hals paintings. With a six-month deadline, Philip, a possible company embezzler, is dispatched to Brazil while Rick heads to New Zealand, each poised to rob small museums of their proudest portraiture possessions. John sweetens the pot by offering substantial prize money to the man who returns with his stolen painting first. Rick enlists his durably built brother, Pete, for the unlawful undertaking, and both begin masterminding the museum theft in Auckland before discovering the painting isn’t even in that city. Meanwhile, Philip arrives in Rio de Janeiro and desperately searches for thugs to assist him in his art-napping operation. But in doing so, he paints a target on himself. Rick reroutes his quest to Moscow, where Pete joins him after surveying other Russian museums. They hatch a foolproof plan to steal the Hals painting.
In his rousing tale, the author entertainingly sketches in John’s and his best friend Nizzy’s histories from their drug-dealing days growing up in Boston and avoids making either character excessively antagonistic or noxious. There is an air of innocent fun that permeates the book; no blood is spilled nor any unsavory tactics employed, making the story appealing for weaker-stomached readers. After several unplanned detours (Philip is drugged, robbed, and becomes enmeshed with a mobster) and varied roadblocks, the two desperate rivals enlist the aid of some shady locals and attempt to accomplish their assignments and return to John as newly street-smart thieves. Sutherland’s globe-trotting adventure has enough cinematic momentum to overcome moments where credulity is strained beyond fictional standards or detailed passages that are confusing and aren’t fully realized, like a closing crime that forces John and Nizzy’s car off an embankment. Sure, the premise is preposterous, but the way the author combines plot and characterization amounts to nothing but pure escapism. This is the kind of creatively driven novel that makes art-napping devilishly entertaining, particularly when it’s conducted by two bumbling miscreants trying to save their livelihoods who ultimately end up learning important lessons about themselves.
Credulity issues aside, this thrilling adventure ride plunges into art crimes, job competition, and greed.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5272-5387-2
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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