The Eight-Day Clock

Name: The Eight-Day Clock
Author: Dale Swanson
ISBN: 978-1-5239-5316-5

by Dale Swanson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 26, 2016

This Florida-set noir makes a few missteps but offers a twisty plot and a hard-boiled, erotically adventurous detective.

bookshelf

A gay private investigator is hired to probe a blackmail threat against a conservative Mormon politician in this comic detective novel.

In the fall of 1996, Tampa, Florida-area congressman Dick Whitlock is up for re-election. As a Mormon Republican running on a family values platform, he can’t afford scandal, so when he’s threatened with blackmail—via compromising photographs of his son, Tony—he hires 30-year-old private eye Jimmy Campaglia. The out and proud Jimmy heads up the agency of Campaglia and Chilton with his bong-hitting boyfriend, Bailey. Jimmy narrates this sexy, convoluted thriller in an appropriately hard-boiled style; for example, when he’s asked to meet with the handsome, seductive Tony in his bedroom, he reflects, “Something tells me he thinks he has the upper hand. Something tells me he knows what I like.” Indeed, before leaving the Whitlock mansion, he enjoys a shower with Tony; later, they and Bailey have an erotic encounter at a gay sex club. On the blackmailer’s trail, Jimmy follows leads to a house where he discovers Adrian, the Whitlocks’ second son, drugged and posed nude in the company of a dead photographer whose film is missing. Then things get even more complicated: a Whitlock chauffeur dies suspiciously, a 911 call goes astray, books on terrorism surface, another extortion attempt is made, and conspirators turn on each other. In his debut novel, Swanson has a good handle on his intricate plot, keeping readers well-oriented as its many developments occur. He also uses his colorful, corrupt Florida setting well: the oversized Whitlock mansion, for example, is described as “a photo-spread sample of what happens when new money loves Gone With the Wind.” Jimmy can be amusingly snide, but the novel’s obsession with physical beauty is unpleasant and makes its characters predictable; unattractiveness and obesity signals evil as surely as black hats do in a Western. Similarly, Jimmy’s gender-normative judgments—he’s brutal about masculine women and effeminate men—could match any conservative politician’s. Still, the protagonist is smart and tough, and Swanson humanizes him with a weakness for irresponsible men and ownership of an 18-pound Himalayan cat.

This Florida-set noir makes a few missteps but offers a twisty plot and a hard-boiled, erotically adventurous detective.

Pub Date: March 26, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5239-5316-5

Page Count: 310

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: July 30, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

bookshelf

A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
FIRE AND BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

bookshelf

BADLANDS

by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015

A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...

bookshelf

Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.

Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.

A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.