A solid cast populates this unusual and underwhelming mystery.
In Bardes’ mystery debut, a police detective becomes embroiled in a series of murders linked to his past.
When Johnson Vasquez was a 20-year-old police academy student, he, his parents, and brother were passengers on a Boeing 767 that crashed, killing his brother and injuring his mother. Johnson radioed for help from the cockpit, summoning emergency services and also prompting fellow academy student Zelda Thomson to investigate the maintenance practices of Firebird Airlines. Because Zelda’s evidence against them was obtained without warrant, Firebird was acquitted of malpractice charges. Seven years later, Johnson and Zelda have graduated to police detectives and are working together as partners, looking into a spate of mistrials. The attorney that Johnson talks to is murdered, as are Johnson’s father (a renowned police detective) and the judge who presided over the Firebird Airlines trial. Before each murder, Johnson receives cryptic, anonymous warnings. Though his presence at the crime scenes makes him a prime suspect, Johnson continues to investigate in both an official and unofficial capacity, delving deeper into the Firebird Airlines case to establish a connection to the current murders. The story unfolds primarily from Johnson’s perspective. The novel shines in its layered characterization and ingenious plot twists, and Bardes’ prose and dialogue are lively, if not always entirely convincing (“You, like thousands of others, were infuriated that the airline was let off without charge, even with the magnitude of vociferous evidence against them”). Throughout the book, however, there remains a sense of remove—both emotional and logical—from the real world. Johnson’s reaction to his father’s death, for instance, is jarringly minimal (“I sighed and casually turned to my right”), and he rarely behaves like a police officer. Still, there’s a case to be made for treating the work as unreliably conveyed, but if that’s case, the execution lacks the deftness to win readers over.
A solid cast populates this unusual and underwhelming mystery.Pub Date: July 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781641339179
Page Count: 192
Publisher: BlueInk Media Solutions
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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