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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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