A solid, if slanted, legal thriller.
A private detective investigates the murder of a politician who supported the sanctuary city movement in this third crime novel in a series.
Bill Coine is a former Massachusetts state police homicide detective-turned-private investigator. He’s vacationing with his wife, Jeanie, in the Berkshires when Ted Prescott, the chairperson of the Fairlane, Massachusetts, board of selectmen, is found hanged in the room next door. Coine helps the inexperienced young patrolman who arrives first on the scene by taking photos and giving advice; this annoys police chief Tom Breshetti, who arrives later. The chief seems eager to dismiss the death as a suicide, even though forensic evidence points to murder, so Prescott’s widow hires Coine to investigate. The death is eventually ruled a homicide, possibly with a political motive. Prescott had led the movement to make Fairlane Township a sanctuary city for undocumented immigrants, and he had an enemy in Jonathan Tanner, a fellow selectman who threatened board members, saying, “God help you both if any member of my family is harmed by a person who is in this country illegally and harbored by this town’s idiotic and unlawful law.” Not long afterward, Tanner’s son died during a carjacking by, as he puts it, “a Mexican who came to Fairlane after being deported three times.” But as Coine delves into the case, he uncovers clues that suggest a very different motive. Tanner is suspected again when another selectman is found murdered. He was killed by a crossbow—a weapon that Tanner is known to possess. When Coine finds that Tanner is being railroaded, he decides to work for the defense team. Only his dogged efforts can bring the real killer to justice. Hanrahan (A Deadly Recollection: Bullets from Brooklyn, 2018, etc.) is a former Boston trial attorney, and he clearly draws on that experience here, providing his novel with believable law enforcement and courtroom underpinnings. He handles these technical details well, while also ably wrangling a large cast of characters. In addition, he has a good sense of pacing and delivers engaging dialogue throughout. That said, the novel does tend to overpraise Coine as a character; for example, when he constructs a bulletin board of clues and question marks—a staple of TV, movies, and true-crime stories that will be familiar to many readers—Jeanie is said to be “impressed and overwhelmed” by it; she actually applauds. However, aside from supplying Coine with admiration, hot chocolate, and sandwiches, Jeanie is a cipher. Indeed, female characters play no role in the novel’s policing, detection, or jurisprudence, which, as a narrative decision, feels desperately old-fashioned. On the other hand, the topic of immigration couldn’t be more contemporary, even if some readers may disagree with this novel’s take on it; for example, Fairlane is said to have seen a sharp uptick in sexual and other physical assaults after becoming a sanctuary city. However, real-life, peer-reviewed studies have shown that undocumented immigrants aren’t more likely than anyone else to commit violent crimes.
A solid, if slanted, legal thriller.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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