This fourth outing for Whiskey, Tango, and Foxtrot (Marked Fur Murder, 2015, etc.) isn’t much of a mystery, but it's a...
Scene-stealing animals are the stars of this ghostly mystery.
Deirdre "Foxtrot" Lancaster is the personal assistant to Zelda Zoransky, an eccentric millionaire with a big estate and diverse interests. Since a zombie movie is being filmed at ZZ’s place, the headless, handless corpse to which her ectoplasmic, shape-shifting dog, Whiskey, leads Foxtrot might be mistaken for a prop. Sadly, the body is all too real. Even worse, Foxtrot suspects that a resident of ZZ’s private zoo may be involved—perhaps Owduttf, a honey badger with a voracious appetite. While they’re on the way to question him, an explosion sends them back to the mansion, where they find Natalia Cardoso badly injured. Natalia was sleeping with unpopular director Maurice Rolvink, whose body may recently have lost its head. Foxtrot takes up the scent, with help from Whiskey and Tango, her telepathic cat. ZZ's estate also features a huge pet cemetery, and the unseen but often present animal specters (which range from household pets to sharks and tigers) are a big help to the detecting trio. Meanwhile, Tango’s plan to produce her own play with a nonhuman cast leads to major fights and jealous scenes burlesquing the actual film production. Foxtrot’s attempts to establish alibis for the major suspects are aided by the ever present animals, but keeping them in line and separating truth from fantasy are no easy tasks.
This fourth outing for Whiskey, Tango, and Foxtrot (Marked Fur Murder, 2015, etc.) isn’t much of a mystery, but it's a witty, zany story whose delightful animals are vastly entertaining.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07843-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are...
A perfect wife’s disappearance plunges her husband into a nightmare as it rips open ugly secrets about his marriage and, just maybe, his culpability in her death.
Even after they lost their jobs as magazine writers and he uprooted her from New York and spirited her off to his childhood home in North Carthage, Mo., where his ailing parents suddenly needed him at their side, Nick Dunne still acted as if everything were fine between him and his wife, Amy. His sister Margo, who’d gone partners with him on a local bar, never suspected that the marriage was fraying, and certainly never knew that Nick, who’d buried his mother and largely ducked his responsibilities to his father, stricken with Alzheimer’s, had taken one of his graduate students as a mistress. That’s because Nick and Amy were both so good at playing Mr. and Ms. Right for their audience. But that all changes the morning of their fifth anniversary when Amy vanishes with every indication of foul play. Partly because the evidence against him looks so bleak, partly because he’s so bad at communicating grief, partly because he doesn’t feel all that grief-stricken to begin with, the tide begins to turn against Nick. Neighbors who’d been eager to join the police in the search for Amy begin to gossip about him. Female talk-show hosts inveigh against him. The questions from Detective Rhonda Boney and Detective Jim Gilpin get sharper and sharper. Even Nick has to acknowledge that he hasn’t come close to being the husband he liked to think he was. But does that mean he deserves to get tagged as his wife’s killer? Interspersing the mystery of Amy’s disappearance with flashbacks from her diary, Flynn (Dark Places, 2009, etc.) shows the marriage lumbering toward collapse—and prepares the first of several foreseeable but highly effective twists.
One of those rare thrillers whose revelations actually intensify its suspense instead of dissipating it. The final pages are chilling.Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-58836-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Big, brooding debut police thriller by Los Angeles Times crime-reporter Connelly, whose labyrinthine tale of a cop tracking vicious bank-robbers sparks and smolders but never quite catches fire. Connelly shows off his deep knowledge of cop procedure right away, expertly detailing the painstaking examination by LAPD homicide detective Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch of the death-scene of sometime junkie Billy Meadows, whom Bosch knew as a fellow "tunnel rat" in Vietnam and who's now o.d.'d in an abandoned water tunnel. Pushing Meadows's death as murder while his colleagues see it as accidental, Bosch, already a black sheep for his vigilante-like ways, further alienates police brass and is soon shadowed by two nastily clownish Internal Affairs cops wherever he goes—even to FBI headquarters, which Bosch storms after he learns that the Bureau had investigated him for a tunnel-engineered bank robbery that Meadows is implicated in. Assigned to work with beautiful, blond FBI agent Eleanor Wish, who soon shares his bed in an edgy alliance, Bosch comes to suspect that the robbers killed Meadows because the vet pawned some of the loot, and that their subsequent killing of the only witness to the Meadows slaying points to a turned cop. But who? Before Bosch can find out, a trace on the bank-robbery victims points him toward a fortune in smuggled diamonds and the likelihood of a second heist—leading to the blundering death of the IAD cops, the unveiling of one bad cop, an anticipated but too-brief climax in the L.A. sewer tunnels, and, in a twisty anticlimax, the revelation of a second rotten law officer. Swift and sure, with sharp characterizations, but at heart really a tightly wrapped package of cop-thriller cliches, from the hero's Dirty Harry persona to the venal brass, the mad-dog IAD cops, and the not-so-surprising villains. Still, Connelly knows his turf and perhaps he'll map it more freshly next time out.
Pub Date: Jan. 21, 1992
ISBN: 0-316-15361-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1991
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