An often moving and nostalgic paean to the vibrancy of boyhood friendships and the minutiae that make up a life.
A gentle, spirited child grows into a hardened Miami police lieutenant in Kaminski’s coming-of age novel.
In 1960s Milwaukee, youngsters Luke Karpinski and his friends Eugene, Stanley, and Gus are constantly looking for their next adventure. Their episodic pigeon-catching, go-kart–building, and laundry-chute–sliding antics offer an engaging, if occasionally anxiety-inducing, read, and the simple innocence of their intimate friendship is heartwarming. However, the dreamy and rambunctious boyhood idyll transforms into a gritty crime drama when Luke moves to Miami to train as a police officer later in life; his compassionate nature is immediately put to the test with the tense situations he encounters on duty. His career spans the height of the drug war in south Florida in the early 1990s,forcing him to shed the softness of his youth as he experiences the violence of drug cartels and takes part in undercover operations with life-and-death stakes. Luke’s loss of innocence—which starts slow and then seems to suddenly accelerate—is interspersed with vignettelike returns to Luke’s childhood, in which Eugene, Stanley, and Gus are always ready to dream up a new exploit that leaves the boys jubilant and exhilarated. Kaminski, the author of Shadow Wolves(2020), weaves a bittersweet story in which happy memories become increasingly precious to the aging Luke, who’s eventually retired and alone. With a deft touch, the author sketches out the lifelong, meaningful relationships of his affable protagonist: with Luke’s family in Milwaukee, with his childhood friends, with his mentor at the police department, and with the new family he makes for himself in Miami. The narrative’s pacing is inconsistent, which makes the storyline feel somewhat meandering, and the dialogue can be a bit melodramatic at times. However, the dynamic energy of Luke’s early escapades and the harsh reality of the Florida drug war largely make up for these flaws.
An often moving and nostalgic paean to the vibrancy of boyhood friendships and the minutiae that make up a life.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-6657-1456-3
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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
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