A well-crafted throwback thriller softened by celebrity worship.
Hired by wealthy Wall Street financier Louis Garrett to find his missing teenage daughter, Lucy, scuffling New York P.I. Jack Coffey uncovers a child sex ring.
The time is the late 1950s. Lucy, Coffey hears soon after taking the case, has actually been abused by her father. For mysterious reasons, she doesn’t want to be found, showing up in public one minute and disappearing the next. In his efforts to save her, Coffey puts himself in the path of bad guys who make a practice of beating him up and shooting him. That doesn’t sit well with his devoted girlfriend, V (for Victoria), a super-successful fashion model who could be off getting richer on European runways instead of tending to Coffey’s wounds. But her loyalty has no limits, culminating in an outlandish action scene in which this Texas girl shows off her shooting skills. In his first novel, TV screenwriter Greisman does an entertaining job of recycling crime fiction tropes. He’s good at capturing the varied looks and sounds of Manhattan, populating the story with fictionalized celebrities from the era. The problem with the name-dropping is that it’s never clear how Coffey, a product of Hell’s Kitchen who fought in World War II, became tight with eccentric geniuses like Marlon Brando and jazz great Thelonious Monk—or what Greisman was thinking in rendering them as such squares. (Brando’s liveliest moment is saying how much he likes having his life threatened. “It’s all grist for the creative mill,” the Method man says.) The beautiful model’s attraction to the schlubby Coffey is also hard to figure. It might work in another kind of novel, but in this noir setting, it’s pure fantasy.
A well-crafted throwback thriller softened by celebrity worship.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9798212342575
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
A great premise leads through all the twists you’d expect to a thoroughly muddy final movement.
Sports agent Myron Bolitar meets the Setup Serial Killer, who’s found a highly effective way to keep anyone from connecting the dots.
There’s no arguing with DNA evidence, the ultimate forensic clincher. So when basketball player Greg Downing’s DNA is found on the scene where retired model Cecelia Callister and her son, Clay, were killed, the FBI comes calling on Myron to ask where they can find Greg. Myron’s a reasonable person to ask because Greg was his schoolmate and former client, the man who wooed and won Myron’s girlfriend away from him and made her Emily Downing. Try as he might, though, Myron can’t help much beyond repeating the obvious: Greg died three years ago, and his body was cremated. Since the Feds aren’t about to give up their search, Myron and his partner, financial advisor Win Lockwood, decide they’d better see if they can get ahead of this story by confirming or contradicting the story of Greg’s death. Meantime, a series of interleaved episodes show the killer eliminating a series of primary targets and framing secondary targets so convincingly for the murders, with special thanks to planted DNA, that it never occurs to the police to connect crimes that were so readily solved on their own. Complications arise when Myron’s thrown together with Jeremy Downing, the son he fathered in a pre-wedding tryst with Emily and then passed off as Greg’s, and when the allies of mob boss Joseph “Joey the Toe” Turant, who was locked up four years ago after his DNA-fueled conviction for the murder of Jordan Kravat, decide to lean on Myron to get him to reveal where Greg is.
A great premise leads through all the twists you’d expect to a thoroughly muddy final movement.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781538756317
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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