What works best are the matchless incidental pleasures Leonard’s world always provides, from lightning-fast descriptions to...
Leonard throws together three battle-hardened survivors from his earlier capers, with predictably unpredictable results.
Jack Foley (Out of Sight, 1996) robbed numerous banks before an amateurish mistake and a run-in with Bob Isom Gibbs, aka Maximum Bob, got him sent to prison for a 30-year stretch. There he meets Cundo Rey (LaBrava, 1983), the four-time killer from Cuba whose debt to society is much shorter. The two felons bond over the manifest injustice of Jack’s disproportionate sentence, and soon Cundo’s hooked Jack up with his smart-chick lawyer Megan Norris, who gets Jack’s sentence knocked down to 30 months less time served. As a result, he gets to go home before Cundo, and the home he goes to is one of the two houses psychic Dawn Navarro (Riding the Rap, 1995) keeps for Cundo. Despite his FBI nemesis Lou Adams’s certainty that Jack will rob another bank within a month, Jack and Cundo have their sights set higher than one more $5,000 score. They plan to insinuate Jack into Dawn’s business, beginning with her high-value deal to free movie star Danialle Karmanos from the oppressive ghost of her late movie-producer husband. Even before Jack’s met and charmed the susceptible Danny, he’s already insinuated himself between Dawn’s sheets, establishing himself as more than her business partner just in time to welcome Cundo back home. It’s clear from the get-go that the real action here won’t be the scam of Danny Karmanos but the drolly straight-faced efforts of the three co-conspirators to increase their share of the pot by reducing their numbers. Yet although the double-crosses are the stuff of the master’s best work, they come across as telegraphic and obligatory, as if the tale were a sketch for a more full-blooded novel.
What works best are the matchless incidental pleasures Leonard’s world always provides, from lightning-fast descriptions to bull’s-eye dialogue, as when Cundo complains about Dawn’s nagging: “Eight years inside I dream about her. I come out, she acts like she’s my wife.”Pub Date: May 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-173314-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
No wonder Scarpetta asks, “When did my workplace become such a soap opera?” Answer: at least 10 years ago.
Happy birthday, Dr. Kay Scarpetta. But no Florida vacation for you and your husband, FBI profiler Benton Wesley—not because President Barack Obama is visiting Cambridge, but because a deranged sniper has come to town.
Shortly after everyone’s favorite forensic pathologist (Dust, 2013, etc.) receives a sinister email from a correspondent dubbed Copperhead, she goes outside to find seven pennies—all polished, all turned heads-up, all dated 1981—on her garden wall. Clearly there’s trouble afoot, though she’s not sure what form it will take until five minutes later, when a call from her old friend and former employee Pete Marino, now a detective with the Cambridge Police, summons her to the scene of a shooting. Jamal Nari was a high school music teacher who became a minor celebrity when his name was mistakenly placed on a terrorist watch list; he claimed government persecution, and he ended up having a beer with the president. Now he’s in the news for quite a different reason. Bizarrely, the first tweets announcing his death seem to have preceded it by 45 minutes. And Leo Gantz, a student at Nari’s school, has confessed to his murder, even though he couldn’t possibly have done it. But these complications are only the prelude to a banquet of homicide past and present, as Scarpetta and Marino realize when they link Nari’s murder to a series of killings in New Jersey. For a while, the peripheral presence of the president makes you wonder if this will be the case that finally takes the primary focus off the investigator’s private life. But most of the characters are members of Scarpetta’s entourage, the main conflicts involve infighting among the regulars, and the killer turns out to be a familiar nemesis Scarpetta thought she’d left for dead several installments back. As if.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232534-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels (Pleasantville, 2015, etc.), deserves a career breakthrough for...
What appears at first to be a double hate crime in a tiny Texas town turns out to be much more complicated—and more painful—than it seems.
With a degree from Princeton and two years of law school under his belt, Darren Mathews could have easily taken his place among the elite of African-American attorneys. Instead, he followed his uncle’s lead to become a Texas Ranger. “What is it about that damn badge?” his estranged wife, Lisa, asks. “It was never intended for you.” Darren often wonders if she’s right but nonetheless finds his badge useful “for working homicides with a racial element—murders with a particularly ugly taint.” The East Texas town of Lark is small enough to drive through “in the time it [takes] to sneeze,” but it’s big enough to have had not one, but two such murders. One of the victims is a black lawyer from Chicago, the kind of crusader-advocate Darren could have been if he’d stayed on his original path; the other is a young white woman, a local resident. Both battered bodies were found in a nearby bayou. His job already jeopardized by his role in a race-related murder case in another part of the state, Darren eases his way into Lark, where even his presence is enough to raise hackles among both the town’s white and black residents; some of the latter, especially, seem reluctant and evasive in their conversations with him. Besides their mysterious resistance, Darren also has to deal with a hostile sheriff, the white supremacist husband of the dead woman, and the dead lawyer’s moody widow, who flies into town with her own worst suspicions as to what her husband was doing down there. All the easily available facts imply some sordid business that could cause the whole town to explode. But the deeper Darren digs into the case, encountering lives steeped in his home state’s musical and social history, the more he begins to distrust his professional—and personal—instincts.
Locke, having stockpiled an acclaimed array of crime novels (Pleasantville, 2015, etc.), deserves a career breakthrough for this deftly plotted whodunit whose writing pulses throughout with a raw, blues-inflected lyricism.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-36329-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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