An advertising man, whose Mediterranean cruise ends with him turned into a fool and a smuggler, finds still bigger problems awaiting him at home.
David Ansell’s marriage has never been happy, and his firm hasn’t paid for his shrewish wife, Eileen, to accompany him when they book his passage on MV Helios so that he can work up a new ad campaign for the Rex Cruising Company. So he’s a perfect target for Melanie Caine, an upscale tart who entices him to her cabin, makes him forget both his marriage vows and his good judgment, and then asks him to carry home Georgie, a stuffed Barbary ape she can’t fit into her luggage. When Ansell returns home, Eileen’s gossipy friend Barbara Morley instantly spots the toy, sees a few telltale blonde hairs it’s picked up, smells the perfume and tips a wink to Eileen. The next day, Ansell gets a frantic call from Melanie demanding that he return the ape to her, but it’s too late, says Eileen triumphantly: She’s already burned Georgie out of jealousy and spite. Even worse, Melanie soon meets a similar fate at the hands of her criminal masters, who, skeptical of her claim that Georgie’s been burned, decide to break into Ansell’s house to look for him and find only Eileen instead. In a darker mood, Ashford (Justice Deferred, 2012, etc.) would turn their unauthorized visit into the opening move in an all-out squeeze play against Ansell. Instead, he focuses on the members of the county CID—DI Jim Glover and DS Josh Frick, who are convinced Ansell killed his wife, and DC Belinda Draper, who finds herself caught in the middle between her superiors and their prey.
Accomplished, routine work disappointing only due to the fact that the most interesting development, Draper’s unlikely romance with Ansell, gets such short shrift.Pub Date: July 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8279-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast finds evil afoot in his latest action-filled adventure (Verses for the Dead, 2018, etc.).
Imagine Florida beachcombers’ shock when they discover a shoe with a severed foot inside. Soon they see dozens more feet, all in identical shoes, bobbing toward the beach. Police and FBI ultimately count more than a hundred of them washing up on Sanibel and Captiva Islands' tranquil shores. Pendergast teams up with the junior Special Agent Armstrong Coldmoon to investigate this strange phenomenon. Oceanographers use a supercomputer to analyze Gulf currents and attempt to determine where the feet entered the ocean. Were they dumped off a ship or an island? Does each one represent a homicide? Analysts examine chemical residues and pollen, even the angle of each foot’s amputation, but the puzzle defies all explanation. Attention focuses on Cuba, where “something terrible was happening” in front of a coastal prison, and on China, the apparent source of the shoes. The clever plot is “a most baffling case indeed” for the brilliant Pendergast, but it’s the type of problem he thrives on. He’s hardly a stereotypical FBI agent, given for example his lemon-colored silk suit, his Panama hat, and his legendary insistence on working alone—until now. Pendergast rarely blinks—perhaps, someone surmises, he’s part reptile. But equally odd is Constance Greene, his “extraordinarily beautiful,” smart, and sarcastic young “ward” who has “eyes that had seen everything and, as a result, were surprised by nothing.” Coldmoon is more down to earth: part Lakota, part Italian, and “every inch a Fed.” Add in murderous drug dealers, an intrepid newspaper reporter, coyotes crossing the U.S.–Mexico border, and a pissed-off wannabe graphic novelist, and you have a thoroughly entertaining cast of characters. There is plenty of suspense, and the action gets bloody.
Great storytelling, a quirky hero, and a quirkier plot make this a winner for adventure fans.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-4725-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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Lucas Davenport goes west.
But first he goes south, called from his home in Minnesota to the Louisiana swamp where hired killer Clayton Deese buried at least five people (the total is actually higher) before coming a cropper seven months ago with his latest target, Howell Paine. Things went sideways, sending Paine to the hospital and sentencing Deese to an ankle monitor he sliced through three days ago. Local FBI agent Sandro Tremanty, discovering Deese’s absence, wants help from the U.S. marshals in rounding up his quarry so that he can implicate loan shark Roger Smith, who’d hired him to hurt Paine and send a warning to his other debtors. And there’s another reason the feds would like to get Deese off the streets: His experiments in homicide have given him a taste for human flesh. Soon enough, Lucas, together with marshals Rae Givens and Bob Matees, has picked up Deese’s trail, which leads first to Marina Del Rey, where he’s joined his half brother, Marion Beauchamps, and Jayden Nast, “a guy with guns, who hates cops,” in a brutal home-invasion crew. Conscientious detective work brings Lucas and the LAPD within a whisker of catching Deese, but he slips away from them and heads to Las Vegas with Genesis Cox, the blonde he’s picked up, and John Rogers Cole, another accomplice. Deese and his cohort must constantly pull new jobs to support their gambling and drug habits, and it’s hard to imagine their eluding the law for very long. But there are deeper threats to their racket. Roger Smith, who knows plenty about Deese, realizes he has every reason to get rid of him, and there turns out to be no honor among the thieves closer to home either.
Professionally entertaining, with lots of realistically frustrating false hopes—though it’s hard to worry very much about the leading question here: Will the franchise hero (Twisted Prey, 2018, etc.) succeed in bringing the crooks to justice before they wipe each other off the face of the Earth?Pub Date: April 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53658-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE
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