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The Place Where The Giant Fell

Name: The Place Where The Giant Fell
Author: John Henry Hardy
ISBN: 978-1-5239-7315-6

by John Henry Hardy ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 2016

Aficionados of Arizona and World War I history will particularly enjoy this story, which offers a wide scope of action.

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Awards & Accolades

Google Rating

In Hardy’s (Whisper in My Ear, 2015, etc.) historical crime novel, an ambitious judge in pre-statehood Arizona sacrifices life and love while his daughter stays true to her own heart.

In 1912 Arizona, Judge Horace Benton maneuvers people like chess pieces to meet his goals of becoming governor of Arizona and then president of the United States. To that end, he postpones his marriage to his Mexican housekeeper and lover, Maria, losing her love but removing a potential hindrance to his career. He orchestrates an alignment between his daughter, Carrie, and Earl Remington, the son of a wealthy rancher, and is certain that she’ll thank him for it: “Carrie will appreciate what I am doing even more when she becomes First Daughter of the American nation.” But first, he must remove Carrie’s true love, Rodney Buchard, a respected young man of Mexican descent. Judge Benton hires a local ne’er-do-well, Oliver Draper, to kill Rodney, but Carrie and the young man foil Draper’s effort, protecting themselves in their secret meeting place—a hidden alcove within nearby Fire Mountain. The just, lawful Marshal Max Greystone heads that murder investigation, and also looks into the death of Ida Mae Carrington, a peer of Rodney’s and Carrie’s. When Rodney and Earl both get drafted into World War I and serve in the same infantry division, Judge Benton convinces Earl to use the opportunity to get rid of Rodney once and for all. Although Judge Benton’s nefarious aims advance the plot, Carrie’s emotional integrity forms the heart of the story. The extended flashback that makes up the bulk of the novel drops Carrie’s perspective when the action moves to the European battlefields, and the details about the war are often engaging but sometimes flat: “Some of the outfits the recruits were issued were woolen winter issue, even though it was May.” However, for those who love heavy doses of historical fact in their fiction, this is a minor issue, as this inverted detective story is an absorbing read.

Aficionados of Arizona and World War I history will particularly enjoy this story, which offers a wide scope of action.

Pub Date: May 12, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5239-7315-6

Page Count: 168

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE

- BOOK REVIEW
THE DAY GOD PLAYED BASEBALL
by John Henry Hardy

- BOOK REVIEW
WHEN BROTHERS MEET
by John Henry Hardy

- BOOK REVIEW
Whisper In My Ear
by John Henry Hardy

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
TWO NIGHTS
by Kathy Reichs

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THE WINNER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 2, 1997

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Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)