Given the proportions of the main ingredients—unbridled criminal mayhem, stolid and limited detection, striking but...
Another trip to the vaults of the British Library Crime Classics discloses this decidedly nonclassic story of gangsters, espionage, and murder most frequent in 1940 London.
The Blitz has yet to commence, but blackouts keep the streets of Soho mostly empty at night. So it’s a doubly unusual event when DI Patrick Aloysius McCarthy, who lives right around the corner from the patch he works, hears a scream pierce the neighborhood past midnight, not long after he’s parted from Sir William Haynes, the Assistant Commissioner. A quick search of the most likely source reveals a stiletto and a woman’s handkerchief, both soaked in blood, but no corpse. But that’s the last time in this tale, originally published in 1940, when there’s a shortage of dead bodies. Even before the CID discovers the remains of Madame Rohner, the mysterious fortuneteller who was actually a man, McCarthy stumbles across the body of PC Harper, whose life was sacrificed to the killer’s escape. More violent deaths will follow, and although it’s not entirely certain whether they’re the work of spies trying to pass wartime secrets to Germany or locally grown gangsters like Floriello Mascagni and Mo Eberstein, that’s about the only mystery on offer here. The pace is rapid, the dialogue functional, and the helter-skelter plotting evidently designed to encourage page turning rather than reflection. Despite the pressures of the war, many readers will surely wax nostalgic for Brandon’s morally simpler world, unspoiled by any trace of such brainy contemporaries as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.
Given the proportions of the main ingredients—unbridled criminal mayhem, stolid and limited detection, striking but disposable characters, a smidgen of mysterymongering—in the stew he’s served, Brandon’s matter-of-fact hero may represent a missing link between Bulldog Drummond and Jack Reacher.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7123-5745-6
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
