A most satisfying read for crime buffs.
The 18th novel in Connolly’s Charlie Parker series takes readers back to the beginning of the ex–New York City detective's career as a private eye, finding him “deep in the Dirty South” helping local police investigate horrific murders.
Parker is an unwelcome stranger in a Cargill, Arkansas, diner in 1997. Local cops find him suspicious when he mentions the name of a young black girl whose violent death has been officially deemed accidental. Parker himself has lost a wife and daughter to vicious murders. He's quit the NYPD, and he's on a quest to find the man who killed his family “and tear him apart.” The story’s mood is dark: The local lake named Karagol has water so black “it seemed to consume light,”and it gave its name to nearby Cargill, a dismal town that seems to consume spirit. The police chief decides to accept Parker’s help investigating some obvious murders, to the chagrin of some important, malevolent people. A company named Kovas Industries makes missile components and is considering a major investment in Cargill, which would turn it into a company town and make certain people rich. The last thing they need is publicity about killings, so they just want the fates of two girls to be “obliterated.” The coroner says they are “poor dead colored girls. That’s not the same thing” as dead girls, suggesting they matter less. And much of the town is angry at the girls for getting themselves killed to begin with. (Yes, what were they thinking?) If they must be deemed murders, one character opines that “it would be best” if a “Negro” were the culprit. But Parker wants to know if it's the same person who killed his family. This is a story populated with richly described characters, be they honorable or slimy, as well as rich descriptions and dialogue. Fast-moving, witty dialogue helps speed this well-plotted yarn to a dramatic conclusion.
A most satisfying read for crime buffs.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2754-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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