A dizzyingly fun array of characters and twists, perfect for a one-sitting read.
In Wahlberg’s debut thriller, a vigilance committee in Venice tries to thwart a criminal organization involved in counterfeiting, prostitution, and murder.
Ty Malone manages The Rose, an office complex acting as headquarters for a group of citizens determined to “correct injustices” when cops can’t help. Those injustices include what happened to union-labor organizer Alfred Martinelli, who was threatened by Latvian mobsters after asking about Brenegers, a store selling counterfeit fashion merchandise. But this could just be the beginning: Ty links the same thugs to a missing girl who may be the same one found murdered on the beach, and Brenegers’ sordid designer Luzarre seems to be behind an escort service. When Uncle Rocco enlists Ty to protect a $1 million necklace for a fashion show Rocco has financed, Ty catches wind of a plan to steal the jewelry and decides to stop it from happening. Keeping up with all the subplots and characters is initially a chore: there are plenty of vigilance committee members, like accountant Nick, and of course the slew of baddies involved with Brenegers and the upcoming fashion show. But Wahlberg has a clear protagonist in Ty, the equivalent of a private eye walking the streets or, in this case, Venice Beach. There’s likewise an unmistakable focus on the potential theft, an investigation that, through questioning, leads Ty to uncover much of the criminals’ activities. As a detective, Ty is delightfully unconventional; in one scene, he garners info from someone with a faux Tarot reading—skills he picked up from fortuneteller Madame Winnette, a resident of The Rose. But Ty’s greatest asset is Sweetlips, his dog, who eases tension and melts hearts by, for instance, placing her head on a lieutenant’s knee and gazing up into his eyes. It’s a shame Ty doesn’t take Sweetlips everywhere, generally opting to have friends dogsit. Wahlberg’s deliberately convoluted plot does unfortunately sideline some of the narrative. The murder that opened the novel, for example, is ultimately the least significant crime Ty looks into; near the end he designates a person(s) who’s “probably” the killer.
A dizzyingly fun array of characters and twists, perfect for a one-sitting read.Pub Date: May 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481192064
Page Count: 290
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
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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