Too many mobsters, too many corpses—most of them mobsters—too many plot twists that cancel each other out: Doeden (The Crux...
Just because the Chicago mob has already used a man up and spit him out doesn’t mean they can’t use him again.
Back in the day, Frank Via was a trusted mob lawyer. But his success in getting his clients off after Operation Monkey Wrench led to his disbarment. Now, he works with his often unpaid associate Nicky Fratelli to eke out a living as a private eye. Via, already in debt to loan shark Charlie Pignotti, can’t afford to turn down jobs, but there’s one he wants no part of: finding Annette Brassi, the 17-year-old daughter of Tina Brassi, who took off with her much older boyfriend after copying the financial records of Tina’s ex, mob boss Tony Brassi, onto a thumb drive. The boyfriend, Tommy Getti, has already been found dead, and Via’s eager to stay out of the line of fire between Brassi and his stepdaughter. But his refusal simply forestalls the inevitable. Soon, he’s facing Brassi himself, who’s much less willing to take no for an answer. Poking around quickly persuades Via that a full-scale war among the heads of Chicago’s three leading criminal families—Brassi, Al Salerno and the aged Carmine Delacante—is just around the corner and that both of Brassi’s rivals would love to have the latest facts and figures on his organization. Via’s investigations provoke such wholesale violence that readers may forget for long stretches that he’s supposed to be looking for Annette Brassi. And the body count, whose numbers rival those of the national debt, prevents any one mobster from emerging as an individual before he’s riddled with bullets.
Too many mobsters, too many corpses—most of them mobsters—too many plot twists that cancel each other out: Doeden (The Crux Ansata, 2010), who writes a mean scene, offers much too much here.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4328-2732-8
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Five Star/Gale Cengage
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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 suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
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.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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