A sharp murder mystery held together by likable characters.
A beautiful young heiress hires suspended Chicago police detective Frankie Turk and his partner in love and sleuthing, Lola Lahti, to find her husband’s killer in this engaging murder mystery.
Lahti and Turk, who had been married to one another, are on disciplinary leave from the police force. As the only residents of Taylor Street, an unofficial safe house for Chicago detectives who are temporarily sidelined, they have plenty of privacy for amorous antics when they aren’t on the clock as private investigators. Turk’s newest client, Cin Ahmen, lost a limb when the bullet she fired in an attempt to save her husband ricocheted into her knee. And that was just the latest in a series of disastrous events since her teenage years in rural Maine. Self-preservation led her to seduce a wealthy Chicago judge who was fly-fishing in the woods near her home. He died, too, albeit of natural causes. Her second husband used some of Cin’s inheritance to open a swanky club called Club Red. Turk discovers that a Chinese national had been supplying the club with martini glasses whose stems contained something other than glass. It’s starting to look like Cin’s second husband might have run afoul of the Chinese mobster, who’s also providing upscale clubs with prostitutes from mainland China. But there are many more shadows in this story, largely because Cin hasn’t shared everything she knows with Turk and Lola. The tension intensifies when an unknown assailant brutally attacks Cin at her own club, sparking in Turk and Lola a fear that the next attack will be fatal. A revelation involving the true identity of the murdered husband lends poignancy to the investigation, and there are more surprises to come. Initially appearing to be some sort of femme fatale, Cin emerges as something else as the story unfolds. Since she’s ultimately a sympathetic character, and since Turk and Lola are quite likable themselves, the pursuit of Cin’s tormenter has a compelling resonance. The dialogue sometimes tilts to the saccharine but doesn’t unduly slow the progress to an unexpected, memorable conclusion.
A sharp murder mystery held together by likable characters.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481988162
Page Count: 348
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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