A great collection of short crime fiction.
Six crime novellas from Winslow, who pays homage to Steve McQueen, Elmore Leonard, and Raymond Chandler.
The world is a broken place, thinks Eva McNabb, a 911 dispatcher in New Orleans in the title novella, and “you come out broken.” Her sons, Danny and Jimmy, are cops, and Jimmy is “as sensitive as brass knuckles.” When he and his partner stumble on a mountain of meth, gunfire and heartbreak follow. In Crime 101, a jewel thief named Davis notes the basics of successful crime—“keep it simple,” for example. He never strays far from “the 101,” his beloved California Highway 101. When Davis jacks $1.5 million in diamonds, Lt. Lou Lubesnick tries to identify and capture him, and it all comes down to this: “What would Steve McQueen do?” There are so many good lines in these yarns. How could the reader resist The San Diego Zoo’s opener: “Nobody knows how the chimp got the revolver”? This story is especially funny: A good cop becomes the department’s laughingstock after disarming Champ the chimp. Lowlife Hollis Bamburger once turned in a term paper with the Wikipedia heading still on it. Even Superman and Spartacus take a hilarious turn. Meanwhile, the characters in Sunset and Paradise spend a lot of time surfing or thinking about surfing. A bail bondsman looks for a heroin-addicted surfing legend, and a woman in Hawaii thinks Peter, Paul, and Mary were Jesus’ parents. Each storyline will keep readers entertained with wit, humor, and occasional sadness. Finally, in The Last Ride, a Border Patrol agent simply wants to return one Salvadoran girl to her mother. The tale is sad and powerful as it comes back to the theme that everyone is broken somehow.
A great collection of short crime fiction.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-298890-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Admirably ambitious in scope and mystery.
A small-town sheriff uncovers centuries’ worth of secrets.
Growing up in historic Shereford, New Hampshire, Mandy Grady chafed at being the sheriff’s daughter. After sowing her wild oats in New York for a few years, though, she eventually returned to the tiny town of her youth, and became the new sheriff when her father died. She not only took on his role, but also his obsession with one case he never solved—a case that haunts the town: The disappearance of the entire Dixon family—both parents and four children—during a summer storm in 1998. In the present day, two glamorous, wealthy outsiders, Raquel and Theo Collins, have bought the old Dixon house and are looking to restore it, maybe transform it into a B&B. A stray dog leads them to a gruesome discovery on the property: a well that contains both human bones and a ledger belonging to an 18th-century midwife. Everyone in Shereford knows the old rhyme: “Ding dong bell, the witch is in the well.” Could it be based in truth? Betty and Mason, the enthusiastic heads of the town historical society, connect the ledger to a journal already in their possession and, together with Raquel and a reluctant Mandy, begin to fill in the story. A young woman appeared in Shereford in the midst of a blizzard in the early 18th century. Taking pity, the townsfolk begged her to stay—until babies started dying under her watch, and she was sentenced to death for witchcraft. Now Mandy has to figure out how these ancient sins are related to the more contemporary crimes—because someone in Shereford knows exactly what happened to the Dixons. Gardner deftly juggles a number of characters, plot threads, secrets, time periods, and motives, delivering a satisfyingly layered novel that interrogates the insular lives and histories of small towns.
Admirably ambitious in scope and mystery.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9781538765142
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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