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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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