A thrilling crime story, captivatingly dramatic and psychologically astute.
In DePrima’s thriller, a reporter investigates the attempted murder of her police officer fiance and follows an increasingly lurid trail of evidence.
J.T. Kennard (she generally answers to Jess) is content to live quietly; she’s a reporter in Kentucky who largely covers “all things equine,” often in the world of horse racing. Her placid existence is shattered by tragedy when her fiance, Joe Schuler, a Louisville Metro cop, is found gravely injured, apparently the result of a car accident during a terrible snowstorm. His skull is fractured, and he’s put on life support, with his prospects for recovery far from clear. After Jess speaks to Lieutenant Alex Washburn, Joe’s immediate supervisor, she concludes he wasn’t in an accident at all; he was a superb driver, and his worst injuries seem to have been inflicted after the crash—she surmises that he was forced off the road and then brutally beaten. Jess conducts an investigation of her own, one as journalistically painstaking as it is relentless. She is a memorable hero, strikingly drawn by the author. In a heated conversation with Joe’s doctor, she rebukes his suggestion that he may have been overly optimistic about Joe’s condition: “You think you’ve given us false hope. I don’t give a flying fuck about your emotional health. What are you going to do about Joe?” Eventually, another body is discovered in the same pond as Joe’s truck. The dead girl is Samantha Catlett, a college classmate of Joe’s son, Josh, and a girl who was unabashed about her crush on Joe. This discovery raises uncomfortable questions about why she was with Joe, and Jess aims not only to find those who attacked him but also to protect his reputation. This is a complex tale, but the author never permits it to descend into convoluted tail-chasing, even as Joe’s assault is revealed to be part of a larger, gruesomely dark conspiracy. The book is the best kind of hard-boiled crime drama—intelligently conceived, powerfully executed, and, for all its unpredictability, chillingly plausible.
A thrilling crime story, captivatingly dramatic and psychologically astute.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9798987508824
Page Count: 300
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.
A series of mounting complications leads to yet another fight to the death between the discarded intelligence agents of Slough House and the morally bankrupt head of MI5.
As Jackson Lamb’s motley crew on Aldersgate Street struggles to cope with the deaths of River Cartwright’s grandfather and mentor, intelligence veteran David Cartwright, and their dim, beloved colleague Min Harper, new troubles are brewing. Diana Taverner, who runs the British Intelligence Service from Regent’s Park, is being blackmailed by former MP Peter Judd to do his bidding. Nothing untoward about that, of course, but this time, Judd’s demands, backed by a compromising tape recording, are more pressing than usual. So Diana reconvenes the Brains Trust—Al Hawke, Avril Potts, Daisy Wessex, and their ex-boss Charles Cornell Stamoran—whose last assignment was to serve as the contact for psychopathic IRA informant Dougie Malone while turning a blind eye to his multiple rapes and murders, which were really none of the Crown’s business. Taverner’s new assignment for the Brains Trust is the assassination of Judd. Since all these developments are filtered through the riotously cynical lens of Herron’s imagination, nothing goes as planned, and when the smoke clears, the fatalities don’t include Judd. Now that Judd knows he has as much reason to fear Taverner as she does to fear him, Lamb offers to broker a peace meeting between them which Slough House computer geek Roddy Ho will keep secret by knocking out 37 security cameras around Taverner’s dwelling. What could possibly go wrong?
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781641297264
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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