A slow boil that expertly paints a private detective and the war-torn land where he resides.
In Magee’s debut thriller, a British military operative turned private investigator gets caught in a crossfire when a missing person case takes him deep into the Republican heartland of north Belfast.
This novel operates under a set of rules unique to Northern Ireland: never trust outsiders, keep to yourself, and avoid even the appearance of cooperation with police or other government officials. So when Roisin Byrne hires Jack Brennan to locate her missing husband, the private eye knows he’ll have his work cut out for him. The fact that Tony Byrne—a Catholic who chose to have Protestant friends—could vanish without a trace is disturbing, and even three years after his disappearance, Tony’s friends and neighbors (including the parish priest) remain reluctant to get involved in the investigation. They believe the man is likely dead, the victim of sectarian sparring. It’s a scenario that Brennan finds convincing, but Roisin begs him to continue his search, pleading: “I want him back—even his bones—if that’s all there is.” Despite his misgivings, Brennan continues his investigation. Could the Irish Republican Army be involved? A gang of racketeers? Or is Tony’s disappearance related to a case of mistaken identity? Magee’s novel could have used a bit more action in the first half. However, it succeeds in establishing the taciturn Brennan as a bona fide player in the world of mystery fiction. The duty-bound, resolute PI proves himself as the type of conflicted, rules-be-damned character that’s proven popular time and again with crime-novel fans. Although deeply loyal, Brennan, who also served in the American Special Forces, is bedeviled by a quick temper and trust issues. The author weaves just enough clues about the investigator’s past into the finely developed plot to make sure his lead character’s back story complements, but doesn’t eclipse, the hunt for the missing Tony. Minor copy editing errors are an annoyance, however (“Smartly dressed in mid-grey suits they looked for all the world like a couple of Mormon’s out on a recruiting patrol”). Overall, though, Magee crafts a riveting tale that will keep readers guessing until the end.
A slow boil that expertly paints a private detective and the war-torn land where he resides.Pub Date: March 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4954-2571-4
Page Count: 438
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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