A fast-paced yarn about drugs, money, cartels, and the horrors they bring.
An NYPD lieutenant works with a sultry informant to infiltrate and take down a Colombian drug cartel in Lansing’s thriller.
Jack Bertolino leads a joint NYPD-DEA operation intended to bust a cartel that brings cocaine into New York. (Jack’s wife is thinking of leaving him and his teenage son is angry about him being an absentee father, but Jack thinks this is all reparable.) He’s introduced to informant Mia Ferrero, a former Miss Colombia, who has become rich working with law enforcement against the cartels. Their targets are Manuel Alvarez, who is holed up in a sprawling Miami mansion, and, in New York, Arturo Delgado, who has a stash house in Queens. Jack is skeptical of the alluring Mia; she is a proven asset, but can she be trusted? Jack gains confidence in her when he learns it isn’t money she’s after—she has personal reasons for dedicating her life to bringing down the cartel. (“If Mia was as good as she looked, and could deliver on promises made, Alvarez was in deep trouble.”) An operation in New York brings mixed results, so the team heads to Miami. Once there, Mia seduces Alvarez, bringing the team closer to the cartel’s leadership. As the cartel leaders learn who is after them, it is not just Mia who is in danger but also Jack and his wife and son. Lansing’s prequel to his Jack Bertolino series begins five years before the first novel in that run. This cartel-busting story focuses on developing the series’ first victim, the seductive Mia. The plot is not original (Colombian cocaine, Miami drug runners) but it is still timely, and the characters feel true-to-life. Exploring Mia’s personal motivations adds some texture to the narrative, as does the breakup of Jack’s marriage. The plotting is tight, the dialogue is convincing, and Mia is eminently capable and surprisingly upright, making this novel an entertaining read.
A fast-paced yarn about drugs, money, cartels, and the horrors they bring.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.
A series of mounting complications leads to yet another fight to the death between the discarded intelligence agents of Slough House and the morally bankrupt head of MI5.
As Jackson Lamb’s motley crew on Aldersgate Street struggles to cope with the deaths of River Cartwright’s grandfather and mentor, intelligence veteran David Cartwright, and their dim, beloved colleague Min Harper, new troubles are brewing. Diana Taverner, who runs the British Intelligence Service from Regent’s Park, is being blackmailed by former MP Peter Judd to do his bidding. Nothing untoward about that, of course, but this time, Judd’s demands, backed by a compromising tape recording, are more pressing than usual. So Diana reconvenes the Brains Trust—Al Hawke, Avril Potts, Daisy Wessex, and their ex-boss Charles Cornell Stamoran—whose last assignment was to serve as the contact for psychopathic IRA informant Dougie Malone while turning a blind eye to his multiple rapes and murders, which were really none of the Crown’s business. Taverner’s new assignment for the Brains Trust is the assassination of Judd. Since all these developments are filtered through the riotously cynical lens of Herron’s imagination, nothing goes as planned, and when the smoke clears, the fatalities don’t include Judd. Now that Judd knows he has as much reason to fear Taverner as she does to fear him, Lamb offers to broker a peace meeting between them which Slough House computer geek Roddy Ho will keep secret by knocking out 37 security cameras around Taverner’s dwelling. What could possibly go wrong?
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781641297264
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
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