It’s as if Robb armed Offred, gave her backup, and turned Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fable into a comic book.
Lt. Eve Dallas follows the path from the murder of a West Village sculptor to a fearsomely powerful cult.
Dallas and Detective Delia Peabody’s snap forensic analysis in the apartment of Ariel Byrd suggests that the young woman enjoyed wine and sex shortly before she was beaten to death with her own mallet. The absence of a condom or any trace of seminal fluids suggests that her final partner was a woman—perhaps Gwendolyn Huffman, the friend who’d had an appointment to sit for a sculpture. Dallas and Peabody, who take against Gwen from the get-go, derive particular pleasure from attacking the tissue of lies she fed them during their first encounter, and their second, in one of the New York Police and Security Department's interrogation rooms, breaks her wide open. But Gwen didn’t kill her lover; that job seems to have fallen to a member of Natural Order, the cult the Rev. Stanton Wilkey founded with significant financial backing from Gwen’s wealthy parents. Natural Order had counted on Gwen’s ability to lure her fiance, millionaire attorney Merit Caine, into their clutches, and when Ariel threatened the impending nuptials, one of them took her out. But which one? As Dallas and Peabody see in a visit to the cult’s closely guarded compound, Wilkey runs a tight ship, and it’s hard to believe that any of his underlings would have gone freelance without authorization from their racist, misogynistic, anti-gay, rapist master. As the franchise heroine squares off against an outsize villain who ticks all the anti-social boxes, readers around the world will be united in their absolute certainty about what’s coming next.
It’s as if Robb armed Offred, gave her backup, and turned Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fable into a comic book.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2502-7274-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.
A snap of the yo-yo string yanks Harry Bosch out of retirement yet again.
Los Angeles Councilman Jake Pearlman has resurrected the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit in order to reopen the case of his kid sister, Sarah, whose 1994 murder was instantly eclipsed in the press by the O.J. Simpson case when it broke a day later. Since not even a councilor can reconstitute a police unit for a single favored case, Det. Renée Ballard and her mostly volunteer (read: unpaid) crew are expected to reopen some other cold cases as well, giving Bosch a fresh opportunity to gather evidence against Finbar McShane, the crooked manager he’s convinced executed industrial contractor Stephen Gallagher, his wife, and their two children in 2013 and buried them in a single desert grave. The case has haunted Bosch more than any other he failed to close, and he’s fine to work the Pearlman homicide if it’ll give him another crack at McShane. As it turns out, the Pearlman case is considerably more interesting—partly because the break that leads the unit to a surprising new suspect turns out to be both fraught and misleading, partly because identifying the killer is only the beginning of Bosch’s problems. The windup of the Gallagher murders, a testament to sweating every detail and following every lead wherever it goes, is more heartfelt but less wily and dramatic. Fans of the aging detective who fear that he might be mellowing will be happy to hear that “putting him on a team did not make him a team player.”
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-48565-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.
The ne’er-do-well son of a successful Irish American family gets dragged into criminal complications that suggest the rest of the Devlins aren’t exactly the upstanding citizens they appear.
The first 35 years in the life of Thomas “TJ” Devlin have been one disappointment after another to his parents, lawyers who founded a prosperous insurance and reinsurance firm, and his more successful siblings, John and Gabby. A longtime alcoholic who’s been unemployable ever since he did time for an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Carrie’s then 2-year-old daughter, TJ is nominally an investigator for Devlin & Devlin, but everyone knows the post is a sinecure. Things change dramatically when golden-boy John tells TJ that he just killed Neil Lemaire, an accountant for D&D client Runstan Electronics. Their speedy return to the murder scene reveals no corpse, so the brothers breathe easier—until Lemaire turns up shot to death in his car. John’s way of avoiding anything that might jeopardize his status as heir apparent to D&D is to throw TJ under the bus, blaming him for everything John himself has done and adding that you can’t trust anything his brother has said since he’s fallen off the wagon. TJ, who’s maintained his sobriety a day at a time for nearly two years, feels outraged, but neither the police investigating the murder nor his nearest and dearest care about his feelings. Forget the forgettable mystery, whose solution will leave you shrugging instead of gasping, and focus on the circular firing squad of the Devlins, and you’ll have a much better time than TJ.
As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780525539704
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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