An intense tale of a self-involved attorney rediscovering her sense of compassion.
In Rosenthal’s thriller, a California district attorney delves into a mystery involving her brother-in-law.
Callie McCall gave up private practice in San Francisco to become district attorney in her hometown of Del Rio in California’s run-down Central Valley. Her plan was to establish herself in the region and then run for higher office. But when a severed body part of a teenage migrant worker is found in a local grove, Callie realizes that her plans will have to wait. The grove is owned by her brother-in-law, Jim Fletcher, who also holds the state Senate seat she seeks. The more she looks into his business practices, the dirtier he appears, so she secretly follows him to a resort in western Mexico, where she meets Nathan Bernstein, an innocent caught up in a dangerous racket. He’s a widower from a wealthy San Francisco family who’s been hired to lead a bird-watching tour at the resort that Callie’s investigating. She soon discovers that Jim is involved in the smuggling of children—a business that gets him killed and puts Callie and Nathan in danger as traffickers follow them north. The strength of Rosenthal’s novel is in how she lets her two main characters evolve. At the beginning of the story, Callie wonders how her new post can aid her political ambitions, but by the end, she’s more concerned about how she can help others; meanwhile, Nathan gets beyond his debilitating grief and steps back into the world. Most of the characters that they encounter live in moral shades of gray, viewing the world through the lens of their own self-interest. Rosenthal also colorfully brings the Central Valley region to life as well as a criminal underground that Callie and, especially, Nathan are ill-equipped to comprehend. Overall, it’s a thought-provoking look at heinous crimes and their effects on larger society.
An intense tale of a self-involved attorney rediscovering her sense of compassion.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64742-055-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
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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