The emphasis on prequels to the partnership subordinates the trademark dialogue between Hap and Leonard, who doesn’t even...
This companion volume to the second season of the Hap and Leonard TV series includes 14 flashbacks to the iconic Texas partners’ youth, eight of them new to print.
Most of the stories land working-class white Hap Collins in fights, and even before he first meets his gay black soul mate, Leonard Pine, when they’re both 17—a meeting chronicled in “Tire Fire”—most of the fights are about race. In the reprints, Hap turns on a school bully with the approval of his principal in “Parable of the Stick,” echoing his father’s legally sanctioned thrashing of the nonpaying customer who threatens him in “Apollo Red”; he declines to take part in a gang-not-quite-rape in the surprisingly delicate “Short Night,” witnesses the dark sequel to another school kid’s bullying in “The Boy Who Became Invisible,” accepts the help of Leonard’s uncle in still another fight in “Not Our Kind”—both of these last two familiar from Hap and Leonard (2016)—and bids an elegiac farewell to the world of his youth in the plotless envoi “The Oak and the Pond.” Hap’s father also takes featured roles in “Coach Whip,” in which he moralizes over Hap’s mother’s killing of a harmless snake; “The Bottom of the World,” in which he fulfills his young son’s request for a scary story in a touchingly comforting way; and “Squirrel Hunt,” in which he covers up the murder of a man who richly deserved it. The best of the new stories are “Stopping for Coffee,” in which a black man whose family is refused service at a roadside cafe finds unexpected allies and enemies; “In the River of the Dead,” in which drug dealers press Hap and Leonard into service diving to recover a chest full of stolen drugs lost among three family members they’ve shot to death; and “Blood and Lemonade,” in which Hap’s mother can’t resist some overexplicit preaching over an otherwise affecting episode in which she briefly takes home a forsaken black child only to be rebuffed by his mother.
The emphasis on prequels to the partnership subordinates the trademark dialogue between Hap and Leonard, who doesn’t even appear in half these stories, to self-serious moralizing over individually effective but highly repetitious tales.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61696-253-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Tachyon
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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 smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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