All the Leonard fans who wisely boycotted last year's old dog of a parable, Touch, can rest easy: this—as the high-hip title announces—is vintage (if not stellar) Elmore, another edgy tale of crime and punishment in Detroit's outer limits that crackles with cool street-smarts and dark-humored urban ironies. Leonard's archest opening ever sets the tone, as bomb-squador Chris Mankowski answers a call to rescue a drag kingpin who's sitting on a dynamite-packed armchair wondering whether he can dive into his Jacuzzi before the chair blows. Turns out he can't: and that explosion is only the first to punctuate Leonard's knowing narration as he limns Mankowski's shift out of the bomb squad and into the Sex Crimes unit, where the tough but decent cop takes on the case of fledgling actress Greta Wyatt, who claims rape by a rich man named Woody. Even as Mankowski romances Greta, he finds that fat Woody is more victim than villain, a booze-befuddled sot who's a perfect mark for the school of sharks circling him, looking to eat his fortune. The sharpest teeth belong to ex-cons Robin Abbott and Skip Gibbs, former bomb-throwing 60's radicals hired by Woody's disinherited brother, Mark, to blow up Woody. When Mark fatally stumbles into the blast set for Woody, mean-spirited Robin and Skip go freelance, hatching an extortion plot that's helped along by Woody's loyal but all-too-greedy valet, ex-Black Panther Donnell Lewis—and run smack up against Mankowski, who's taken a shine to the hapless Woody. As Woody wobbles in his drunk's haze, cop and extortionists play out a game of wits that winds up as a lethal war of explosives in a wickedly inventive, droll climax. Leonard's usual superb pacing, uncanny ear for patois, and menagerie of quirky characters are here in full force; but this fails to match his best for its want of a truly riveting villain or hero (Woody and Donnell, sparkling creations, steal the show from the more thin-blooded Skip, Robin, and Mankowski). And, crucially, at bottom this is formula Leonard—a well-done variation, sure, but of a theme that's beginning to lose its bloom, if not its commercial appeal.
Pub Date: May 16, 1988
ISBN: 0062120352
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Arbor House
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1988
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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