A detective story that’s more about the detective than the story, but the protagonist’s personal drive and all-around appeal...
In Pastre’s debut thriller, an Arizona cop digs into a cold case involving a missing 16-year-old girl and a potential killer who’s evaded justice for more than a decade.
Detective Nick Shaw of the Verde River Police Department isn’t sure what to make of a handwritten note found in an old car undergoing restoration. It appears to be an aborted murder confession, but it discloses neither the writer nor the apparent victim. Nick, however, quickly sets his sights on Charles Thurston, the car’s original owner, whose stepdaughter, Jamie, was reported missing about a decade earlier, about the same time as the note was dated. The detective and other police officers, going with the assumption that Jamie is dead, re-examine the case, and it’s fairly obvious that they’re getting a little too close to the truth when one cop is assaulted and another is shot. The investigation ultimately finds Nick chasing a murderer all the way to El Salvador. The novel begins as a typical detective story—a man walks into the police department with evidence that reignites a cold case—but it’s more about Nick’s ensuring that a criminal pay for his crimes. Nick’s incentive for solving the murder is both considerable and convincing; he sees his wife’s death from a traffic accident as murder, with the drunken driver as a killer who’s escaped major punishment. The investigation itself is less cogent; it’s unclear why the original inquiry never made headway since the notoriously unpleasant and reputedly abusive Thurston would have been a viable suspect back then. But the cast, like the protagonist, is wonderfully nuanced—Nick’s idle partner, Beau, who spends most of his time on smoke breaks or at lunch; Lacey, Nick’s love interest, who adorns herself in vintage apparel; and the easily stressed police chief, Pritchett, whose secretary reminds him of his blood pressure and who tries relaxing with aromatherapy. We learn the killer’s identity well before the ending, along with an explanation of what exactly happened to Jamie, but the third act, quite fittingly, concentrates on character, as Nick’s major hurdles by this point are meting out justice and deciding for himself if he has fallen in love with Lacey.
A detective story that’s more about the detective than the story, but the protagonist’s personal drive and all-around appeal are ample enticements for readers.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494719821
Page Count: 296
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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