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
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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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