A spicy and satisfying Cajun stew of twists, violence, and secrets.
A biology student engaging in a field test in poisonous snake- and rat-filled New Orleans swampland literally stumbles on the bloated corpse of a man who recently interviewed her for a job.
In Cagney’s first O’Malley Family Mystery, Tulane graduate student and jazz clarinet player Aislinn “Ash” Jones, wading in a swamp, squishes something under her boot. It’s the nose of the deceased Laughton Cockcroft, director of the nonprofit Swamp Life Society. With the hope of securing an internship with the society, Ash recently interviewed with Cockcroft. Nine days before Ash discovered Cockcroft’s body, two young men were found dead in the swamp. When NOLA Police Det. John O’Malley gets the call about the victims, his partner (and longtime lover), Jay Cordone, remarks that the body count is now eight in five months. Jay and John are both from large families; in fact, John’s sister, Erin, is also a police officer. Another local family is the Thibodeauxs; teenager Robbie Thibodeaux is one of the latest victims in the bayou. His sister, Clarise, tells John her brother was involved with a man conducting some sort of experiments. Shortly afterward, Clarise disappears—because of foul play or is she in hiding? In one of many coincidences, Ash, who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks with an alcoholic, drug-addicted sex worker mother, used to know Robbie when he was a child—even changed his diapers. The gripping novel’s interconnected families smack of a soap opera with crime as a foundation and Ash as the unsuspecting linchpin. Double-crosses, murder, rape, snake venom, and hungry gators will hold the audience’s attention. There’s perhaps too much of everything, or, as Ash would say when talking about New Orleans, things are “always lagniappe—a little extra.” Despite the crimes and wildlife attacks, there is engaging humor in the book. But some bits don’t ring true, as when Cockcroft reveals to Ash details about another candidate for the job he is offering, or when Ash recalls she once needed a public defender because she stole a candy bar. And wouldn’t eight murders in five months be reason to bring in the FBI?
A spicy and satisfying Cajun stew of twists, violence, and secrets.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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