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
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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