The journey to the end is almost as taxing as that faced by the book’s put-upon migrants.
The discovery of a body on the Tex-Mex border fuels a teenager’s suspicions about his father, the local sheriff, in this debut thriller by a longtime Drug Enforcement Administration agent.
Seventeen-year-old Caleb Ross has been living in an uneasy truce with his authoritarian father ever since his mother disappeared. His father claims the woman, whom he's forbidden his son to speak of, left him for another man. Caleb believes his mother met a violent end, and when a flexi-cuffed corpse is discovered near a crossing point for illegal immigrants, the small Texas town’s new deputy, Chris Cherry, begins to have doubts about his boss as well. The book, in which each chapter is told from a separate character’s point of view—though only Caleb’s chapters are in the first person—eschews the tight, compact, punchy prose that a writer like Jim Thompson might have used on this material. It’s aiming for epic status. But the length (more than 400 pages), the humorlessness, the inclusion of more and more plot points (drug smuggling, murdered DEA agents, the sheriff’s advances on the town’s new young teacher) don’t add up to good storytelling or suspense. Instead, the book offers an insistent showy grimness. It’s the kind of novel in which as soon as a child gets a pet, you know some baddie is going to kill it, the kind where racial epithets abound not because it’s how the characters talk but because it allows the author to show how tough-minded he is.
The journey to the end is almost as taxing as that faced by the book’s put-upon migrants.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17634-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
A humorous tale filled with recipes for blueberry lovers, high school angst, and a few tricks up its mysterious sleeve.
Two groups of besties a generation apart vie for the honor of being Bar Harbor’s top sleuths.
Divorced mother of two Hayley Powell has recently married Bruce Linney after years of a contentious relationship dating back to high school. Both work for the Island Times, she as a food columnist and he as a crime reporter. Six days before they’re to leave on their honeymoon cruise, their dream is interrupted by the sudden arrival of Hayley’s mother, Sheila, following a breakup with her longtime boyfriend. Dismayed by the sudden addition to their tiny house even though Sheila volunteers to petsit while they’re away, Hayley is upset by Sheila’s criticism of her clothes and her cleaning and cooking skills. Hayley’s best friends, Liddy and Mona (Death of a Wedding Cake Baker, 2019, etc.), are the daughters of Sheila’s high school buddies Jane and Celeste, who are appalled when they attend a barbecue where their old school enemy Caskie Lemon-Hogg shows up with a homemade blueberry pie. Caskie’s hobbies are blueberry picking, making and selling delicious treats, and flirting with other women’s husbands and boyfriends. So Hayley’s brainstorm for an impromptu class reunion for her mom’s friends ends in a nasty confrontation. Caskie takes out a restraining order against her former classmates, and Sheila moves to an inn after a fight with Hayley and badmouths Caskie all over town. When she finds Caskie dead in the room next to hers, Sheila’s naturally a suspect. Both sets of friends are determined to find the real killer even after Caskie’s closest friend, Regina Knoxville, verbally abuses them at the funeral. There are enough other suspects to put the inexperienced sleuths in danger of attracting attention from a determined killer.
A humorous tale filled with recipes for blueberry lovers, high school angst, and a few tricks up its mysterious sleeve.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2493-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Herron shows once again that the United Kingdom’s intelligence community is every bit as dysfunctional and alarmingly funny...
A new round of troubles for the slow horses of Slough House, where burned-out, compromised, or incompetent members of Her Majesty’s intelligence community have been banished (Spook Street, 2017, etc.), pits them against a group of terrorists who seem to be working from MI5’s own playbook.
It doesn’t usually make headlines when a crew of uniformed men efficiently murder a dozen inhabitants of an isolated village, but when the target is Abbotsfield, in the shadow of the Derbyshire hills, attention must be paid. The time-servers at Slough House, the last group anyone in the know would expect to get anywhere near this outrage, are roped into it when Shirley Dander celebrates her 62nd drug-free day by saving her colleague Roderick Ho from getting run down by a car. Flatulent Jackson Lamb, the head of the troops at Slough House, doesn’t believe Shirley’s story of attempted vehicular homicide, but even he changes his tune after a second attempt on Ho’s life kills an intruder whose corpse promptly disappears and police match the bullets found at the scene to one of the weapons used in the Abbotsfield massacre. When someone tosses a bomb into the penguin shelter in Dobsey Park and a second bomb is disabled before it can blow up a Paddington-bound train, alarm bells go off for J.K. Coe, the newest arrival to Slough House, who realizes (1) these outrages are all being perpetrated by the same team, (2) they’re following a blueprint originally conceived by the intelligence community, and (3) they still have several escalating chapters left to go. Just in case this all sounds uncomfortably menacing, a subplot concerning the threats posed to the nation’s security by a cross-dressing Brexit partisan is uncomfortably comical.
Herron shows once again that the United Kingdom’s intelligence community is every bit as dysfunctional and alarmingly funny as Bill James’ cops and robbers.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61695-961-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
© Copyright 2025 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.
