A clever, supercool gumshoe effortlessly steals the show in this delightful caper.
A private eye’s familial ties convince others that she’s on the wrong side of the law in Watson’s thriller.
Lucia Scafetti, still in her late 20s, has been running a private investigator’s office in Philadelphia for nearly a decade. It’s become a bit mundane, with the majority of her jobs involving cheating husbands. She gets an unexpected jolt when her father, Carlo, shows up at her door. He’s out of prison a few months earlier than his scheduled September 1995 release from a 20-year sentence he received after killing (for hire) eight people. Lucia doesn’t fancy reconnecting with her dad, whose mobster past has tainted her surname with infamy. But almost as soon as he reappears, Carlo mysteriously vanishes. Then someone starts killing criminals using his M.O., and the police think it’s Lucia. And everyone seems certain that she now has her hands on a diamond and a cache of rare coins that her father had allegedly stashed prior to his jail sentence. If Lucia hopes to clear up the whole mess, she’ll have to delve into the past, identifying the person who hired Carlo as a gunman. As the PI hits the streets to get answers, she eludes the police who are following her, and bad guys take shots at her and even kidnap her beloved dachshund, Rocco. Luckily, she has the strength and resilience to tackle such a precarious undertaking as well as the savviness to make everything she’s doing look easy.
The author delivers an enthralling mystery. Many of the characters are unpredictable, from a potentially crooked cop to various untrustworthy family members. A host of knotty questions concerning the homicides, pilfered goods, and Carlo’s disappearance builds intrigue, and readers won’t have to wait until the very end for every resolution. Lucia is an extraordinary hero, standing 6 feet tall and weighing in at a muscular 200 pounds, leading one person to deem her “Amazonian.” Her most notable feature is her wit, as she repeatedly outsmarts others and delivers one-liners with panache: “You’re not only shopping for a smackdown, you brought a coupon.” She also owns up to her faults, as when she uses people to get what she wants, although she’s much more benevolent than she lets on. Her big personality and lurid backstory occasionally overshadow the stellar supporting characters; attorney Hank Narváez, her new office neighbor and possible romantic interest, relates the sad fate of his professional boxer father, a compelling story that is dropped when Lucia, as she’s wont to do, seizes the conversation. Rocco the dog, however, is an exception—Lucia fawns over him as she does no one else, and he’s a fiercely loyal dog whose incessant barking makes his presence impossible to ignore. There are whiplash-inducing plot turns throughout and a wholly gratifying final act. Hopefully Watson will give this unforgettable private eye her own well-deserved series. A clever, supercool gumshoe effortlessly steals the show in this delightful caper.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781955065788
Page Count: 340
Publisher: D. X. Varos, Ltd.
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
