A fast-paced novel that’s hampered by excessive complexity and overheated prose.
In Hopkins’ (The Staten Island Butcher, 2018, etc.) latest mystery series installment, private investigator Tom Cavanaugh tries to clear his brother’s name of a murder that may have been committed by a serial killer.
Father Jack Bennis, a Jesuit priest, stumbles upon a dead man in his New York City church. The man has a wooden skewer sunk into his neck, and his eyes have been gouged out and placed into one of his pockets. Attached to the skewer is an index card, scrawled with the number 2. Jack quickly calls his brother, Tom—a former homicide detective and combat soldier who’s now a hard-boiled private investigator—for help. Just before discovering the corpse, Jack learned that a 12-year-old Colombian orphan named Chico, whom the priest had helped years ago, has just escaped from his orphanage in Cartagena. Jack quickly departs for South America in search of the boy, inevitably making him a chief suspect in the recent murder. Meanwhile, Tom conducts an investigation of his own in an attempt to exonerate Jack, and he discovers evidence that a serial killer is on the loose—and that the murder may also be tied to the Italian-American mob. In this eighth series entry, Hopkins packs the brisk plot with drama and sudden paroxysms of violence. However, the story gets rather convoluted as Jack confronts gangsters trafficking drugs and child sex slaves as he tries to rescue not only Chico, but also his own former flame, María Isabelle, from danger. The author does skillfully depict the moral squalor of the criminal underworlds in New York and Cartagena. However, his prose style is consistently melodramatic and occasionally overwrought, as when a reporter lambastes Tom when he reneges on a deal: “You know you’re a creep, Cavanaugh! You’re holding out on me. We had a deal! You’re a conniving fraud. You’re nothing more than a dirty weasel and a liar. I hate your guts!” And although the reader needn’t have read the previous books in the series to understand this one, there are so many connections to them that it would be helpful to do so.
A fast-paced novel that’s hampered by excessive complexity and overheated prose.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-69320-720-4
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Out Reach Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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