An entertaining, richly imagined action yarn with intellectual bite.
A paramilitary do-gooder defends a Texas town from corporate skulduggery in this rollicking adventure tale.
This is the second novel in Bond’s Third Chance Enterprises series about a trio of private-eye security specialists. It’s a solo outing for Durwood Oak Jones, an ex-Marine contractor and West Virginia sorghum farmer with a sideline in righting injustices for people who respond to his ads in Soldier of Fortune magazine. One such letter comes from Chickasaw, Texas’ Democratic mayor, Carol Bridges, who thinks the Hogan Consolidated factory, a mainstay of the local economy, is being forced by lawsuits into a buyout that will result in mass layoffs. Nosing around corporate paperwork and court filings isn’t a typical project for Durwood, who usually solves problems with his fists, an M9 semiautomatic, and his arthritic hound dog, Sue-Ann. But Carol, an attractive, redheaded Iraq War vet who can quote Scripture, appeals to him, and the apparent villains—a 28-year-old CEO and some lawyers—are so loathsome that he feels compelled to get involved. The case leads to violence that gets Durwood framed for murder after he uncovers evidence of double-dealing (and a bit of BDSM); the case later takes a swerve that makes him question everything he thought he knew about the case. Bond’s tale features his usual lean, laconic, and evocative prose and mixes vivid character development (“He fared poorly when talking just to talk. Every useless word felt like some tiny roofing nail you’d spilled and had to go hunting through the grass for”) with gripping procedural and fight scenes (“Durwood punched his spine again. Harder….Holcomb, on his knees, was sinking like a slab of butter left out overnight”). It also has unobtrusive political themes, as Durwood feels himself a defender of honest capitalism against those who decry it and the “Wall Street sharks” who parasitize it. Eventually, however, he finds himself second-guessing his own heartland ethos; at one point, he muses that “The story had looked simple, black lines on white paper,” causing him to nurse “his own righteousness like the worst men of the age.” The result is an energetic page-turner with intriguing social commentary.
An entertaining, richly imagined action yarn with intellectual bite.Pub Date: April 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73225-529-6
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
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
Fans will relish every high-energy moment without demanding rational explanations for every detail.
A retired hit man’s wish to impress his new love leads him back into a thicket of crime and corruption.
During the dinner date they’re finally going out on, Chicago area therapist Gwendolyn Lord shares with English professor Cameron Winter a story she’s just heard from forensic psychologist Livy Swain, an old school friend, of an impossible crime. Owen McKay, arrested six months ago for killing his wife and son and crying, “It’s still there! Still there!,” was shot to death with a nail gun inside his closely watched prison cell. Though his initial reaction is idle curiosity, Winter resolves to show off his prowess to Gwendolyn by solving the mystery. Dr. Billy Whitefield, the pathologist who conducted the postmortem on McKay, shares with Winter a monstrous revelation that he’s been blackmailed into concealing: He removed a spidery attachment from McKay’s brain whose existence was deleted from the official report. After a friend at his college links the implant to Thaumatix—a company whose motto is “We’re in the business of miracles”—Winter learns of another case that sounds eerily similar: the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a Connecticut high school student by a previously inoffensive carpenter who’s killed before Winter can question him. Surrounded by assassins and amoral corporate overlords, Winter leans more and more into his relationship with Gwendolyn, though the person he most wants to talk to is the Recruiter, the nameless boss he trusted to make life-or-death decisions when he worked as a contract killer. Miraculously, the Recruiter, who’s vanished, returns to Winter’s life. But what if he can’t be trusted any more than everyone else?
Fans will relish every high-energy moment without demanding rational explanations for every detail.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781613166864
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© 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.
