A middling mystery, but a persuasive look inside professional horse racing.
After their first major success, a couple involved in horse racing encounter deadly foes in this mystery novel.
Black, the author of Mountain Justice (2013), effectively immerses the reader in the world of competitive horse racing in this work, and it’s a vivid setting for a book that combines sports and crime fiction. As the story opens, Black describes how FraziersFury, a thoroughbred horse, “pricked his ears, arched his neck, and with the slightest of bucks, danced his way onto the dirt oval” where the race begins. Additionally, the author offers detailed dialogue by the race announcer: “On the far outside, FraziersFury is gaining with every stride…Nordstrom has moved past BaskervillesBobby…FraziersFury is moving right with him.” Nordstrom, the losing horse, belongs to Angie McCoy, a wealthy trainer who enlists her lawyer, Nelson Dickenson, to purchase FraziersFury from the owners. When Natalie Frazier, a horse breeder and wife of trainer Jeff Frazier, turns down Nelson’s offer, someone tries to steal FraziersFury, but Santos Velasquez, the groom, chases them away. After the Fraziers’ horse defeats Nordstrom again, someone lures Natalie to a secluded area and kidnaps her; however, she escapes and hotwires a truck. After reuniting with Jeff, though, Natalie insists on watching FraziersFury race, bringing the focus back to racing. Overall, the novel is likely to thrill racing aficionados. However, mystery readers may wish that it had a tighter, more suspenseful plot. As it is, roughly 50 pages separate each crime, and the most important one—a murder of a major character—doesn’t come until the novel’s halfway point. The rest of the novel, though, focuses on who’s behind the killing and other criminal acts, such as cutting the brakes on a truck, which leads to one man’s hospitalization.
A middling mystery, but a persuasive look inside professional horse racing.Pub Date: March 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-975790-12-7
Page Count: 318
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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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