Although this second outing relies too heavily on its predecessor (Blood’s Echo, 2017) and Maldonado spends too much time...
An ex-narc leads a war against a powerful crime family.
Veranda Cruise is supposed to meet an informant in her hunt against the Villalobos drug cartel. But after the informant goes up in flames and the hit man who killed him escapes, she’s left with nothing except her hatred of the clan that’s tried to destroy her family. After spending more than two years investigating the cartel, along with its biggest rival, Veranda was recently ousted from Phoenix’s Drug Enforcement Bureau and, after her name was cleared, transferred to Homicide only six weeks ago. So she’s very surprised when she’s appointed the lead detective in a multiagency task force called Operation Scorpion Sting. It’s a great honor, but it also means that if she fails, she’ll take several people down with her—and she’ll be even more of a target of the Villalobos clan than she already is. Adolfo Villalobos, the heir apparent of the crime family, must also prove himself worthy. Knowing that his ruthless father, El Lobo, has as much reason to hate Veranda as she does him, Adolfo has hired a computer hacker who helps him track Veranda’s every move, especially her bold plan to shut down both the Villalobos operation and the rival cartel. Scorpion partially succeeds by putting the other crime family out of business, but El Lobo and all his operatives elude them. The Villalobos cartel now rules Phoenix, and it’s all on Veranda. Her supervisors keep her in place, but before she has a chance to form a new plan—and after many, many pages of flashbacks and back story—she comes face to face with El Lobo’s chief enforcer and a brilliant plan to discredit her. It nearly succeeds, except for help from an unexpected source and Veranda’s own determination to show what she’s really made of.
Although this second outing relies too heavily on its predecessor (Blood’s Echo, 2017) and Maldonado spends too much time setting up its plot, the payoff, when it finally comes, is satisfying.Pub Date: March 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7387-5102-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
As tangled and turbulent as the hero’s nightmares, and that’s saying quite a bit.
Having survived his tempestuous debut, P.T. Marsh, of Georgia's Mason Falls Police Department, is back for more—including some residue from that first case that just won’t go away.
Dispatched like an errand boy to wealthy real estate mogul Ennis Fultz’s home to find out why he hasn’t joined his bridge buddies, Mayor Stems and interim police chief Jeff Pernacek, for their monthly game, Marsh and his partner, Remy Morgan, find Fultz dead in his bed. It turns out that his passing, devoutly longed for by so many of the people he’d crushed or outwitted on his way to the top, was helped along by the strategic dose of nitrogen somebody substituted for the oxygen he inhaled regularly, especially when he was expecting particular demands on his virility. Marsh and Morgan quickly focus on two candidates who might have made those demands: Suzy Kang, a recent visitor who was so eager to cover any traces that she’d been to Fultz’s house that she sold the car she’d driven there, and Connie Fultz, the victim’s ex-wife and perhaps his current lover, who acidly swats them away and tells them: “Look for some little gal who’s into bondage.” McMahon excels in sweating the procedural details of the investigation, which take the partners from a search for Suzy Kang and that missing car to a not-so-accidental car crash that’s evidently targeted a young girl who has no idea she’s implicated in the case. But he’s set his sights higher, taking in everything from a civil suit the relatives of the perp Marsh shot in The Good Detective (2019) have launched against him to a possible conspiracy behind the deaths of his deeply grieved wife and son, all of it larded with Georgia attitude and truisms, a few of which rise to eloquence (“I wasn’t good at faith. I was good at proof”).
As tangled and turbulent as the hero’s nightmares, and that’s saying quite a bit.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53556-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Schneider’s debut enlivens the police procedural with offbeat characters and an appealingly complex hero.
Hollywood detectives catch the strange case of a brutally burned body.
Detective Tully Jarsdel is a former academic, leading his partner, Morales, to call him Professor. When he fights his way through multiple news crews to reach a corpse one day, it's unlike any he’s ever seen. The body is twisted, partially ravaged, and burned so badly it’s unrecognizable. Jarsdel and Morales intensely question Dustin Sparks, the horror-movie special-effects expert who found the body. He eventually admits that he saw the body being dumped from a van, but his addiction to OxyContin makes him a compromised witness. While waiting for DNA results, Jarsdel and Morales watch missing persons reports closely. An odd red disk glued to the victim’s palm turns out to be a 1996 quarter painted red: the case’s first clue, albeit a murky one. DNA connects the victim to grizzled convict Lawrence Wolin, who identifies the man as his brother. The pieces of Grant Wolin’s life come together via interviews prompted by a search of his dirty apartment. He sold jars of “genuine Hollywood dirt” on the street, smoked marijuana occasionally, and was apparently asexual. A dinner scene at the home of Jarsdel’s scholarly parents provides insight into his psyche and his sense of isolation. Though he fits in with neither the gritty world of police work nor the ivory tower of academia, he has a passion for justice.
Schneider’s debut enlivens the police procedural with offbeat characters and an appealingly complex hero.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4926-8444-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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