A procedural with unexpected turns, nasty villains on both sides of the law, and a capable hero.
In Christ’s crime novel, a female patrol officer discovers a flair for detective work in the case of a young Black man falsely accused of killing a white woman.
Kendi Liston, a sound engineer, makes the fateful decision to call 911 after he finds the body of a white woman on the street, though he knows that, in the eyes of the police, “a young Black man who finds a dead white woman must have had something to do with putting her there…something to do with making her into a dead white woman.” Sure enough, Crowe, the “racist asshole” Glock-pulling veteran cop on the scene (“Don’t even blink till I tell you to”) is only too eager to finger Kendi as the killer, especially when Kendi is caught in a lie about not knowing the victim. Regan, the backup officer on the scene, was mentored by Crowe; she acknowledges that, from him, she learned “things they didn’t teach you in the academy.” But she has a different outlook on police work and is deemed “disloyal” by Crowe, becoming a target of his harassment as she is determined to get justice for Kendi. “No need to play Sherlock Holmes,” another officer tells her, but the ambitious Regan risks both her career and her life for the cause. Christ’s origin story deftly sets up a presumed series with Regan at its center. She has readers’ rooting interest from the get-go, whether she’s defying Crowe and going the extra mile for Kendi or maintaining her steel in the face of Crowe’s grudge campaign that only gets worse following a raid that goes tragically wrong. She proves herself a capable detective, uncovering some truly bad guys involved in porn and human trafficking. Christ writes gripping action scenes (a climactic confrontation between Regan and the woman’s killers is suspenseful with a satisfyingly hard-hitting payoff), but some of the Black patois is cringe adjacent.
A procedural with unexpected turns, nasty villains on both sides of the law, and a capable hero.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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