The further exhilarating adventures of an unbeatable detective, packed with tantalizing loose ends.
In this third installment of a mystery series, a private eye takes on another dangerous case.
After battling drug-smuggling operations and Mafia kingpins, the Vietnam veteran–turned–divorced gumshoe Peter O’Keefe returns to fight for his personal safety. Novelist and litigator Flanigan’s latest mystery picks up after the cliffhanger ending in The Big Tilt (2020), when the investigator was nearly blown to bits by a car bomb in late 1987. The action resumes three months later as a PTSD–saddled O’Keefe slowly heals from extensive “flash-fried” burns with no leads on a suspect, though the local Mafioso faction, the “Outfit,” “a nest of vicious killers and thieves,” seems like the plausible perpetrator. After media coverage of the bombing, folks from O’Keefe’s ex-wife to his landlord fear for their safety when he’s nearby. Joined by his investigative firm partner, George Novak, and a bomb-sniffing dog, O’Keefe pieces together minor clues but becomes “idiotically determined to poke his stick around in the Outfit snake pit.” The detective insinuates himself into the crosshairs of mob boss Paul Marcone, hoping to call a truce. But O’Keefe only stirs up a hornets’ nest of nefarious henchmen. Also hot on the Outfit’s trail is determined United States attorney and Senate hopeful Russell Lord, who’s dedicated to rooting out the faction after putting former crime boss Carmine Jagoda in jail. But after Jagoda’s sudden death and his likely successor’s mysterious disappearance, Lord fears a Mafia “dynastic succession” reshuffling could spur more violence. As O’Keefe draws closer to tailing the Outfit, Flanigan pumps up the suspenseful action, which has become a reliable facet of the series. Though the author’s mobster plot has more convoluted complexities than in previous mysteries, the story accelerates at a decent clip thanks to a wealth of well-developed characters, like Jagoda’s daughter, Rose, who is also the wife of the missing mobster; Marcone; and a bevy of crooked thugs. A murder, a shootout, and an incriminating audio recording ramp up the action, and despite a deadly snake bite, O’Keefe remains in top investigative form. An integral subplot involves his young daughter, Kelly, who morphs into a fierce, preteen supersleuth investigating her mother’s shady fiance. By the novel’s conclusion, Flanigan will capture readers’ hearts with hopes for a future O’Keefe family reunion.
The further exhilarating adventures of an unbeatable detective, packed with tantalizing loose ends.Pub Date: May 19, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9855614-3-2
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Arjuna Books
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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