Talton continues to ladle out murky complications long after most patrons will be looking for the exit. Readers most likely...
History professor–turned–sheriff’s deputy David Mapstone celebrates the 40th anniversary of the only recorded murder of an American journalist on American soil by reopening the case, with decidedly mixed results.
In 1978, as he was carried from his burning car to the hospital where he’d die, Phoenix Gazette reporter Charles Page moaned, “They finally got me. Reid, Mafia, RaceCo! Find Mark Reid.” In response, Reid, the enforcer for Page’s old nemesis, land-fraud king Ned Warren, went to prison for planting the bomb that killed Page. So did roofing contractor Dick Kemperton, who detonated the device, and contractor Darren Howard, who allegedly paid for the hit. All of them are now too dead to implicate anyone else, but there have always been rumors that higher-ups like Warren or “wealthy rancher” Freeman Burke Sr., were behind the killing. In honor of its anniversary, Maricopa County Sheriff Mike Peralta, nettled by a text message that mixes taunts, threats, and Shakespeare tags, wants Deputy David Mapstone, who’s already solved 117 cold cases, to solve this one within three weeks. Dave’s wife, computer whiz Lindsey, is still recovering from a near-fatal shooting (High Country Nocturne, 2015), but that doesn’t stop her from identifying the owner of the phone that sent the text as Rudy Jarvis, Reid’s unacknowledged son, who gets killed when his own car explodes, setting off a string of “canonical” crimes that echo Page’s murder and a series of related outrages in the present tense. Working sometimes with, sometimes against history student Malik Jones, Dave plunges into a conspiracy that seems to involve every noted Arizona native from Bruce Babbitt to Barry Goldwater.
Talton continues to ladle out murky complications long after most patrons will be looking for the exit. Readers most likely to last till the final curtain are those with a serious interest in the real-life criminal history of Phoenix.Pub Date: May 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0957-4
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
The jaws are those of a shark which makes quick work of a pretty young woman on the Long Island shore (Amity) where the disaster is kept quiet in the (financial) interest of the town's summer rentals. This is no longer possible after the next victim—a youngster—and police chief Brody is wrongly blamed for not closing the beaches sconer. He has other troubles — namely a restless young wife who remembers better days playing country club tennis and she is not immune to a visiting ichthyologist, the only one fascinated by the local shark. The finale entails some ugly, lashing action against the big one that's been getting away and all of it is designed to jolt that maneating masculine readership who probably won't notice that it ""should of"" been better written.
Pub Date: Jan. 18, 1973
ISBN: 978-0-345-54414-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1973
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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