Steve Carella and Cotton Hawes have pulled the night shift, so they're on call when long-retired concert pianist Svetlana Dyalovich gets drilled twice inside her apartment door. An interrupted burglary? Then why did the burglar also shoot her cat—and how did he know that Mme. Dyalovich had just drawn her life's savings from her bank earlier that day? While the boys of the 87th precinct are puzzling over these questions—and the pianist's granddaughter, lounge singer Priscilla Stetson, is trying to track down the legacy her grandmother promised her- -their neighbors over at the 88th have their own case: a horribly mutilated hooker, her slashed pimp, and a drowned crack dealer, all killed after a wild debauch by three cherubic prep-school kids. Longtime fans of this venerable series (Romance, 1995, etc.), knowing better than to assume the cases will be connected- -they crisscross at several places but never exactly shake hands- -will feel luxuriously at home in fictional Isola, where taxi drivers fall prey to the temptations of the flesh, voodoo priestesses stand on their civil rights, cockfighters invoke the example of the Founding Fathers, and leaving your car at a gas station to be serviced is a bigger mistake than you can imagine. McBain seems to be saving his tightest plotting these days for his Matthew Hope series. But if shaggy storytelling doesn't bother you (here the whole 87th gets upstaged by the 88th), his 47th tour of Isola is as exuberant as his best.
Pub Date: May 15, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-51805-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
Some of the twists are more convincing than the last one, which leaves a few loose ends. But it’s great to see Cole (The...
The shooting of an apparent serial killer allows the LAPD to close the books on seven murders—but private eye Elvis Cole won’t have it.
Dead suspects don’t look any more guilty than Lionel Byrd. In his hand is the gun that fired the fatal shot into his head; at his feet is an album with Polaroids of seven women who’ve been killed at the rate of one a year, each photo snapped moments after the subject’s death. Homicide detective Connie Bastilla is only too happy to write finis to a troublesome case. But Cole, who produced the evidence that allowed Byrd’s lawyer to verify an alibi for the fifth murder, isn’t convinced. And he comes up with enough evidence to convince the seventh victim’s brothers to quit beating him up and help him investigate further. The harder Elvis digs, the more Byrd’s suicide looks like a murder whose evidence the cops are deliberately sweeping under the rug. But how far does the cover-up extend, and how high up are its beneficiaries? With some help from Detective Carol Starkey, late of the bomb squad, and his partner Joe Pike, whom nobody’s ever accused of being too sensitive, Cole follows the trail through a string of well-placed twists to a satisfying climax.
Some of the twists are more convincing than the last one, which leaves a few loose ends. But it’s great to see Cole (The Forgotten Man, 2005, etc.) back in action.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-8164-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
Perhaps too much ingenuity for its own good. But except for Jeffery Deaver and Sophie Hannah, no one currently working the...
Fired Scotland Yard detective Daniel Hawthorne bursts onto the scene of his unwilling collaborator and amanuensis, screenwriter/novelist Anthony, who seems to share all Horowitz’s (Forever and a Day, 2018, etc.) credentials, to tell him that the game’s afoot again.
The victim whose death requires Hawthorne’s attention this time is divorce attorney Richard Pryce, bashed to death in the comfort of his home with a wine bottle. The pricey vintage was a gift from Pryce’s client, well-to-do property developer Adrian Lockwood, on the occasion of his divorce from noted author Akira Anno, who reportedly celebrated in a restaurant only a few days ago by pouring a glass of wine over the head of her husband’s lawyer. Clearly she’s too good a suspect to be true, and she’s soon dislodged from the top spot by the news that Gregory Taylor, who’d long ago survived a cave-exploring accident together with Pryce that left their schoolmate Charles Richardson dead, has been struck and killed by a train at King’s Cross Station. What’s the significance of the number “182” painted on the crime scene’s wall and of the words (“What are you doing here? It’s a bit late”) with which Pryce greeted his murderer? The frustrated narrator (The Word Is Murder, 2018) can barely muster the energy to reflect on these clues because he’s so preoccupied with fending off the rudeness of Hawthorne, who pulls a long face if his sidekick says boo to the suspects they interview, and the more-than-rudeness of the Met’s DI Cara Grunshaw, who threatens Hawthorne with grievous bodily harm if he doesn’t pass on every scrap of intelligence he digs up. Readers are warned that the narrator’s fondest hope—“I like to be in control of my books”—will be trampled and that the Sherlock-ian solution he laboriously works out is only the first of many.
Perhaps too much ingenuity for its own good. But except for Jeffery Deaver and Sophie Hannah, no one currently working the field has anywhere near this much ingenuity to burn.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-267683-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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