Best for political junkies. Otherwise, wait for his next.
From Carr, Boston Herald columnist, talk-show host and author of true crime books (The Brothers Bulger, 2006, etc.), a first novel in which all politics are local. And dirty.
Jack Reilly is a former cop who left the Boston PD accompanied by a nice fat disability pension and without much in the way of official regret. While on the job he’d chauffeured for the iconic Boston mayor, whose political smarts were legendary, and who over the years taught Jack the invaluable lesson that served as the foundation for his later career: always know where the bodies are buried. Now the old mayor is gone, and Jack, transformed into a political insider with a famously flexible code of ethics, has become the go-to-guy whenever there's a need for big league mud-slinging. State rep Daniel Patrick Mahoney is an ambitious if unsavory pol. Currently, the number two power in the House, he approaches Jack because he sees himself as Speaker once he figures out a way to rid the House of its current Speaker. Dirt’s required, the kind that sticks, the kind Jack is handsomely paid for providing. But at the moment Jack has a lot of distraction on his plate. There’s the deal his jailbird brother Martin has sucked him into, which has already resulted in one untimely, thoroughly inconvenient corpse, more stiffs on the cusp; there’s his increasingly bleak relationship with two of Boston’s scariest mobsters and, on the sunnier side, there’s his growing attachment to Katy Bemis, the scrappy Boston Herald investigative reporter whose legs do such pleasant things for a short skirt. It’s she, however, who asks Jack the pertinent question, the one certain readers, surfeited by an overload of chicanery and corruption, might well yearn to have answered: " 'Do you know anyone who isn’t crooked?' " Jack remains silent.
Best for political junkies. Otherwise, wait for his next.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2640-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
