Beneath the so-so mystery is a heartfelt account of the risks Latinos face in modern America whether or not they're...
Miami private eye Willie Cuesta is sent to central Florida to track down a missing person. Maybe persons.
Three months ago, Ernesto Pérez, who’d sneaked into Florida to pick produce after the workers at his coffee farm defected for better-paying American jobs, suddenly stopped sending remittances to his family back in Mexico. Now his son, Pedro Pérez, has disappeared while looking for him. So starchy immigration lawyer Abbie LeGrange wants Willie to nose around in Cane County till he finds at least one of them. Capt. Rory Camp, of the Cane County Sheriff’s Office, and Homer Eccles, the recently widowed farmer for whom Ernesto worked, don’t exactly welcome Willie with open arms, but they don’t shut him down either. Soon he’s chatting with people as different as coyote Narciso Cruz, who supplies Eccles with laborers; Loretta Turk, the Eccles crew leader to whom Ernesto complained about a foreman who cheated him; and E.J. Eccles, the farmer’s beautiful daughter, who wants Willie to teach her, um, the salsa. The deeper he digs, the more clearly Willie sees that the county is being torn asunder by two equally dangerous groups: the heroin crew, represented by party girl Dusty Powell and dealer Marcus Morrell, and the Sovereign Rights Movement personified by powerful BioMaster owner Quincy Vetter, who refuses to sell the feds a worthless scrap of land because he takes every government intrusion into his county as a personal affront.
Beneath the so-so mystery is a heartfelt account of the risks Latinos face in modern America whether or not they're undocumented.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-55885-907-4
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Arte Público
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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
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