Stellar characters enhance this leisurely but engrossing mystery.
A former journalist’s investigation into fraud becomes a murder case in this debut novel.
At his favorite North Carolina tavern, Lassie James spots his old flame for the first time in 30 years—in the flesh, that is. The ex-reporter has seen plenty of Dr. Holly “Fats” Pike in the media. She’s a successful scientist best known for developing a cure for baldness. Now, she needs Lassie’s help; anonymous emails claim a researcher at her company is fraudulently tweaking its findings. Lassie, now a freelance writer/lyricist, can’t say no to Fats, especially since the gig pays $5 million. He uses his investigative journalist skills to peruse the company’s employee records. Before he makes much progress, one of Lassie’s old friends from the University of North Carolina winds up a murder victim. Though it seems unrelated to the fraud investigation, it turns out his friend may have had information on the anonymous emailer. Two more deaths ensue, which authorities suggest link to the first homicide. Lassie, meanwhile, looks for connections between a researcher cooking numbers and someone committing murder, which may point him directly to a killer. In Bare’s tale, the protagonist’s laid-back, first-person narration creates a measured pace. For example, his investigation primarily consists of whittling 100,000-plus employees down to a single fraudster, a methodology he unnecessarily explains three times. Nevertheless, Lassie regularly offers tidbits of insight; marrying someone, he concludes, isn’t about just finding the right person, but the ideal time as well. In addition, intriguing characters make for a consistently absorbing story. Most notable is Lassie’s tavern-owner friend, who finds an ingenious way to sell the worthless land he’s inherited. By the final act, Lassie unravels the mystery, leading to the amateur sleuth’s gratifying elucidation that checks off all the questions. His expressive song lyrics (some inspired by Fats) open each chapter in snippets and appear in full at the book’s end.
Stellar characters enhance this leisurely but engrossing mystery.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73498-840-6
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Wisdom House Books
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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