A deftly composed and highly enjoyable crime story.
A recently reunited couple navigates the complex aftermath of a murder in Ben-Horin’s debut thriller set in 1985.
After local marijuana grower and controversial community-radio host Yosh Steinmetz is brutally murdered in Ukiah, California, local law enforcement initially think the crime is a drug deal gone bad. However, Yosh rankled many members of the community with his radio show, as he was happy to tackle any local issue and speak out against whomever he saw fit. This includedUkiah’s racist and antisemitic Rev. Footman, who oversees a cabal of White supremacists. Spider Lacey, a Vietnam veteran and car mechanic, discovered Yosh’s bloody corpse, which he surmised was the handiwork of “an army or an automatic weapon”; Spider had just gotten back together with Siobhan,with whom he fell in love 10 years prior. They separated when Siobhan moved to New York City for law school. Now she’s an environmental lawyer investigating a case in Ukiah, and as she and Spider rekindle their relationship, they become entangled in the murder case, which may be connected to political corruption. In this remarkable first novel, Ben-Horin offers adept prose with plenty of moments of humor. For example, when Spider and Siobhan check out an online forum for private investigators, the author describes it as consisting “of a single aspiring P.I. who enjoyed assuming different personas and engaging in coruscating dialogues with himself.” The major characters are all fully realized, down to their small quirks, such as Spider’s love of his video cassette recorder and his distaste for television commercials. The sociopolitical setting is also intricately woven into the story, as when its revealed that the woman who takes over Yosh’s business, Julie Choate, first met him through a network of political activists.
A deftly composed and highly enjoyable crime story.Pub Date: July 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64428-112-3
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
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