Reading this book will offer a perverse comfort to those who think our screen-infested culture curtails any possibility of...
Think all those surveillance cameras in public places will keep you safe and solve every crime? An intrepid Boston journalist and her police detective boyfriend find out that they probably won't.
Veteran TV reporter Jane Ryland and homicide cop Jake Brogan have seen a lot in their respective careers. And they still see each other as often as they can, even though both work to keep their romance relatively quiet since cops and reporters aren’t allowed to fraternize. Even so, the hours they spend apart are especially hectic and unnerving in Ryan's latest mystery-thriller (Truth Be Told, 2014, etc.). To begin with, there’s a fatal broad-daylight stabbing in Curley Park near City Hall. Lots of cameras are around, but Jake and his colleagues can’t quite figure out who’s been killed and who the perp or perps might be. And one young woman working with the city’s digital camera system can’t understand why her boss cuts off her attempt to retrieve video of the incident. The peripatetically employed Jane, meanwhile, is dispatched to the scene by one of the local TV stations just to “gather facts” and is pestered by a wannabe paparazzi who claims to have some pertinent pictures of what happened. And in the middle of this chaos, Jane gets a phone call from her soon-to-be-married sister saying her fiance’s 9-year-daughter from a previous marriage, who’s supposed to be their flower girl, is missing. The clock’s ticking on both cases, which, despite their differences, have darker forces of extortion, abduction, and corruption in high places lurking beneath their surfaces. Ryan, writing her fourth Jane Ryland novel, displays her trademark flair for knotty plotting, though it sometimes seems she's taking on more details than she can easily handle–just like her appealing protagonists. As the dual narratives rumble toward their respective climaxes, you somehow feel as though you’re pushed too hard and strung along too much at the same time. Still, this novel retains enough craftiness and jaunty humor to make it worth a night or two of breakneck reading.
Reading this book will offer a perverse comfort to those who think our screen-infested culture curtails any possibility of genuine mystery. Looks can still deceive in the digital age.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7495-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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