A gruesome thriller with intriguing ideas held back by flat characters and bizarre subplots.
A former detective stumbles into a perplexing new investigation in Bardes’ mystery thriller.
It’s been seven years since Johnson Vasquez left the Cincinnati Police Force, cast as a pariah of the community after a catastrophic accident. Still struggling to recover from these traumatic events and desperately needing money to support his pregnant wife and three children, Vasquez accepts jobs working at the local bike shop, a pizza parlor, and at the bowling alley of one of his friends. But even as Vasquez focuses on these simple tasks, murder and conspiracy follow him wherever he goes; at each job, one of Vasquez’s new coworkers ends up dead following a fight with the boss. The bosses are adamant that the unusual deaths are suicides, but all evidence points to the contrary. Vasquez dusts off his sleuthing skills and discovers that Cincinnati has been plagued by other apparent workplace murders in which the accused swear that the victim’s wounds were self-inflicted, even when this seems impossible. What’s more, they all have one peculiar thing in common: each had been reading Vasquez’s own book about his experiences with injustice (“Although I had written out my account of the events of my bizarre case for the entire world to see, only a handful of people believed it to be true”). As Vasquez seeks the truth behind the strange murders, Bardes immerses readers in an intriguing mystery and introduces a wonderfully creepy villain. Unfortunately, the characters are difficult to connect with—the dialogue feels unrealistic, providing forced exposition and confusing explanations about Vasquez’s convoluted past, and no one seems to have appropriate reactions to shocking events. (A disturbing subplot involving Vasquez’s mother’s severed head only becomes increasingly off-putting as everyone treats the upsetting item like a banal piece of trash.) Bardes does offer plenty of grisly murders for horror fans, but the strange interactions slow down the pacing, keeping potential thrills to a minimum.
A gruesome thriller with intriguing ideas held back by flat characters and bizarre subplots.Pub Date: July 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781641339179
Page Count: 192
Publisher: BlueInk Media Solutions
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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