A fast-paced, if not entirely original, crime novel.
Hunter tells the story of an assistant district attorney out to settle personal business with the mob in this debut crime novel.
Rachel Marcatto, a former cop and mob lawyer, has finally found her true calling. As an assistant DA in Manhattan, she’s on a one-woman crusade against the Roselli crime family, which she believes was responsible for her father’s death. As a result, Rachel finds herself exposed to the dangers of the streets; in a single day, she sees a witness murdered in front of her, gets involved in a shootout in Prospect Park, and her car gets intentionally rear-ended on the Manhattan Bridge. The next day, she receives a note at her office: “Be at the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial at 5:00 tonight. Come alone.” Rachel hopes that the meeting will lead her to something she can use to take down mob boss Dominic Roselli, but she’s unsure whom she can trust in the ranks of law enforcement, which include homicide detective Bill Casey, her father’s former partner; crime-lab head Dr. Lillian Barry, her longtime friend; and colleague Tommy D’Amato, the mayor’s nephew. As she relentlessly pursues the case, she proves that you can take the cop off the streets, but you can’t take the streets out of the cop. Hunter writes in a breathless, graphic prose that embodies the hard-driving, impatient character of her protagonist: “It was the inharmonious site of blood splattered on the front panel of her tan trench coat...gun tucked in her waistband, and the distant look in her eyes that, no doubt, gave alarm to those walking by her.” Hunter also depicts a community with plenty of links between cops, lawyers, and mobsters, and although these connections make for compelling fiction, they sometimes strain credulity. For example, early in the book, Rachel is bafflingly surprised to learn that a Mafioso whom she’s been investigating for months was also one of her father’s best friends. Even so, Hunter presents a fun adventure in an underworld of bad cops and complex criminals, even if it’s a world that genre fans will find rather familiar.
A fast-paced, if not entirely original, crime novel.Pub Date: May 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4827-3625-0
Page Count: 366
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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