A strong, resilient female fighter headlines this action-packed tale.
In this first installment of a thriller series, a New York City cop displays her martial arts prowess at a tournament but struggles to control her powerful dark side.
Homicide detective Leila Wells earns her “Super Cop” moniker by catching bad guys. But after tragically losing her partner/lover, David Neal, she needs time away from the force. So she turns to street fighting, a perfect activity to dull her pain using her “Five-Animals Kung Fu” mastery. She teams up with Jamaal Gordon, who hails from Jamaica and practices capoeira, a Brazilian martial art that utilizes dance. The duo earns some cash, but the real challenge is an upcoming tag tournament on a Pacific island. It’s also a way for Leila to get out of New York; she sees constant reminders of David wherever she goes. He helped her subdue her “dark side,” which often emerges when she fights. This sinister side proves invaluable in fisticuffs but can sometimes spin off into anger and violence. On the island, Leila and Jamaal eye the championship despite the detective’s inexplicable nagging suspicions of the multibillionaire running the tournament. Piro deftly showcases diverse characters and fighting styles. For example, one Japanese contestant, evenly matched against Jamaal, combines ninjutsu and taekwondo. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s plenty of exhilarating action: Leila “stopped him by lashing out her left hand, jabbing him in the face, then followed up with her right hand, striking him in his waist.” Yet Leila is a well-rounded hero; David becomes a voice in her head, giving advice and coaxing her to let him go. At the same time, her dark side sparks a few vicious scenes, as when she breaks someone’s ribs and mercilessly pummels an opponent. This series opener leaves some things vague (for example, supernatural elements), which the sequel will likely address.
A strong, resilient female fighter headlines this action-packed tale.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-67-729198-2
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2021
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
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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