Maybe too much of some very good—that is, very wicked—things.
Chicago looks more dangerous than ever in police detective Annalisa Vega’s second case.
Called to the scene of DS Leo Hammond’s fatal shooting, Annalisa finds not only interior designer Kayla Hammond, his much younger wife; Annalisa’s own ex-husband and current partner, Detective Nick Carelli; and their boss, Commander Lynn Zimmer, but two unwelcome new arrivals, Detectives Frankie Vaughn and Paul Monk, who together with Leo and Detective Tom Osborne worked together as the Fantastic Four, a team that racked up a slew of homicide arrests and made countless enemies along the way. Even after Zimmer claims ownership of the case for Division North, Vaughn and Monk make it clear that they’re not going away, and Annalisa’s left to figure out whether the well-insured Leo was killed by his cheating wife, one of his partners, or an intruder in a frogman suit Kayla insists she saw in the house. The list of suspects swiftly grows to include Moe Bocks, the used-car dealer Leo was convinced strangled Josie Blanchard back in 1988, and David Edwards, who’s been released years after his conviction for killing Bass Lounge waitress Sandra Romero in a botched robbery that came to a hard ending when the Fantastic Four, arriving in response to her 911 call, shot club owner Cecil Barry dead. As Annalisa, who’s not one to back away from confrontations, gets taken off the case and then placed on medical leave when she’s suspected of murder herself, Schaffhausen piles on the complications and then faces the serious challenge of winding up the case, or cases.
Maybe too much of some very good—that is, very wicked—things.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-2502-6463-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.
A snap of the yo-yo string yanks Harry Bosch out of retirement yet again.
Los Angeles Councilman Jake Pearlman has resurrected the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit in order to reopen the case of his kid sister, Sarah, whose 1994 murder was instantly eclipsed in the press by the O.J. Simpson case when it broke a day later. Since not even a councilor can reconstitute a police unit for a single favored case, Det. Renée Ballard and her mostly volunteer (read: unpaid) crew are expected to reopen some other cold cases as well, giving Bosch a fresh opportunity to gather evidence against Finbar McShane, the crooked manager he’s convinced executed industrial contractor Stephen Gallagher, his wife, and their two children in 2013 and buried them in a single desert grave. The case has haunted Bosch more than any other he failed to close, and he’s fine to work the Pearlman homicide if it’ll give him another crack at McShane. As it turns out, the Pearlman case is considerably more interesting—partly because the break that leads the unit to a surprising new suspect turns out to be both fraught and misleading, partly because identifying the killer is only the beginning of Bosch’s problems. The windup of the Gallagher murders, a testament to sweating every detail and following every lead wherever it goes, is more heartfelt but less wily and dramatic. Fans of the aging detective who fear that he might be mellowing will be happy to hear that “putting him on a team did not make him a team player.”
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-48565-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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