A classic mystery in the style of Philip Macdonald’s Anthony Gethryn stories; complex, insouciant and very British.
A clever sleuth’s efforts to find a missing man involve him in murder.
H.R. Hunt, the head of Hunt Coffee Limited, wants Jack Haldean, a World War I pilot turned mystery writer and amateur sleuth, to find his vanished great-nephew Mark Helston. Although the police have concluded that Mark left for reasons of his own, Haldean (Off the Record, 2011, etc.) agrees, despite his reservations, to look for him. Mark and his sister Pat inherited a large amount of money from their grandmother, most of it going to Mark. Pat, who’s been collecting an income from her share, would inherit it all if Mark was proved dead. A body Haldean finds in a deserted house is identified as that of the Brazilian who managed the Hunt coffee plantation. Suddenly Mark is a murder suspect. The case becomes even more confusing when Pat’s first husband, Larry Tyrell, who was reported killed in the war, turns up claiming amnesia. Pat’s current husband, Greg Jaggard, loves her despite their often rocky relationship and is suspicious that Tyrell’s appeared now that Pat may be in line for a fortune. H.R. Hunt has a pal of Haldean’s looking for reasons for the company’s suspiciously low profits, even though Frederick Hunt, who currently runs the business, is untroubled by them. When a company secretary is murdered and Haldean finds Mark buried under another man’s name, Jaggard is arrested for murder. Haldean doesn’t believe in Jaggard’s guilt, but it will be tough to prove him innocent.
A classic mystery in the style of Philip Macdonald’s Anthony Gethryn stories; complex, insouciant and very British.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8169-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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