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
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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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