The best things here are Fletcher’s detailed, precise first-person descriptions of boxing and slugging and his accounts of...
This debut novel introduces an African-American boxer-turned-shamus struggling to ply his trade in Depression-era New Orleans.
Fifteen years ago, before he left the ring because he realized the color line would keep any black boxer from rising to the top, William Fletcher hired his muscles out to New York enforcer Bill Storm. Their association ended abruptly when Fletcher, left to guard a boy his boss had kidnapped, set him free instead. Now Storm, apparently unaware of the irony, has come to the Big Easy in search of his vanished daughter, and he wants Fletcher to help. It takes little time for Fletcher to find Zella Storm, who’s working as a singer in a seedy club, and even less to ascertain that she’s not interested in returning to her father. But that’s not really a problem, since Storm’s been shot to death in Congo Square, the first of what turn out to be many victims in this loose, violent, wide-ranging tale. Storm’s murder heralds Fletcher’s unwilling involvement in a gang war between local racketeer Johnny Ranalli and New York numbers runner Sal Mallon, the kidnapping victim Fletcher freed so long ago. The inevitable result is lots of clipped threats, fistfights, and hired thugs no more memorable while they’re still alive than after they’re dead. Bywaters saves a pair of big surprises for the end, though by that time the ranks of the cast are so diminished that precious few suspects remain.
The best things here are Fletcher’s detailed, precise first-person descriptions of boxing and slugging and his accounts of the racism to which he’s routinely subjected. But although Bywaters plows some of the same fields as Walter Mosley, the harvest isn’t nearly as rich.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-07307-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
A humorous tale filled with recipes for blueberry lovers, high school angst, and a few tricks up its mysterious sleeve.
Two groups of besties a generation apart vie for the honor of being Bar Harbor’s top sleuths.
Divorced mother of two Hayley Powell has recently married Bruce Linney after years of a contentious relationship dating back to high school. Both work for the Island Times, she as a food columnist and he as a crime reporter. Six days before they’re to leave on their honeymoon cruise, their dream is interrupted by the sudden arrival of Hayley’s mother, Sheila, following a breakup with her longtime boyfriend. Dismayed by the sudden addition to their tiny house even though Sheila volunteers to petsit while they’re away, Hayley is upset by Sheila’s criticism of her clothes and her cleaning and cooking skills. Hayley’s best friends, Liddy and Mona (Death of a Wedding Cake Baker, 2019, etc.), are the daughters of Sheila’s high school buddies Jane and Celeste, who are appalled when they attend a barbecue where their old school enemy Caskie Lemon-Hogg shows up with a homemade blueberry pie. Caskie’s hobbies are blueberry picking, making and selling delicious treats, and flirting with other women’s husbands and boyfriends. So Hayley’s brainstorm for an impromptu class reunion for her mom’s friends ends in a nasty confrontation. Caskie takes out a restraining order against her former classmates, and Sheila moves to an inn after a fight with Hayley and badmouths Caskie all over town. When she finds Caskie dead in the room next to hers, Sheila’s naturally a suspect. Both sets of friends are determined to find the real killer even after Caskie’s closest friend, Regina Knoxville, verbally abuses them at the funeral. There are enough other suspects to put the inexperienced sleuths in danger of attracting attention from a determined killer.
A humorous tale filled with recipes for blueberry lovers, high school angst, and a few tricks up its mysterious sleeve.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2493-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Herron shows once again that the United Kingdom’s intelligence community is every bit as dysfunctional and alarmingly funny...
A new round of troubles for the slow horses of Slough House, where burned-out, compromised, or incompetent members of Her Majesty’s intelligence community have been banished (Spook Street, 2017, etc.), pits them against a group of terrorists who seem to be working from MI5’s own playbook.
It doesn’t usually make headlines when a crew of uniformed men efficiently murder a dozen inhabitants of an isolated village, but when the target is Abbotsfield, in the shadow of the Derbyshire hills, attention must be paid. The time-servers at Slough House, the last group anyone in the know would expect to get anywhere near this outrage, are roped into it when Shirley Dander celebrates her 62nd drug-free day by saving her colleague Roderick Ho from getting run down by a car. Flatulent Jackson Lamb, the head of the troops at Slough House, doesn’t believe Shirley’s story of attempted vehicular homicide, but even he changes his tune after a second attempt on Ho’s life kills an intruder whose corpse promptly disappears and police match the bullets found at the scene to one of the weapons used in the Abbotsfield massacre. When someone tosses a bomb into the penguin shelter in Dobsey Park and a second bomb is disabled before it can blow up a Paddington-bound train, alarm bells go off for J.K. Coe, the newest arrival to Slough House, who realizes (1) these outrages are all being perpetrated by the same team, (2) they’re following a blueprint originally conceived by the intelligence community, and (3) they still have several escalating chapters left to go. Just in case this all sounds uncomfortably menacing, a subplot concerning the threats posed to the nation’s security by a cross-dressing Brexit partisan is uncomfortably comical.
Herron shows once again that the United Kingdom’s intelligence community is every bit as dysfunctional and alarmingly funny as Bill James’ cops and robbers.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61695-961-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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