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RACE INTO MURDER

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

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THE GREY WOLF

One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.

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A routine break-in at the home of Sûreté homicide chief Armand Gamache leads slowly but surely to the revelation of a potentially calamitous threat to all Québec.

At first it seems as if nothing at all triggered the burglar alarm at Gamache’s home in Three Pines; it was literally a false alarm. It’s not till he receives a package containing his summer jacket that Gamache realizes someone really did get into his house, choosing to steal exactly this one item and return it with a cryptic note referring to “some malady…water” and “Angelica stems.” Having already refused to meet with Jeanne Caron, chief of staff to Marcus Lauzon, a powerful politician who’s already taken vengeance on Gamache and his family for not expunging his child’s criminal record, Gamache now agrees to meet with Charles Langlois, a marine biologist with ties to Caron who confesses to a leading role in stealing Gamache’s jacket. Their meeting ends inconclusively for Gamache, who’s convinced that Langlois is hiding something weighty, and all too conclusively for Langlois, who’s killed by a hit-and-run driver as he leaves. The news that Langlois had been investigating a water supply near the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups sends Gamache scurrying off to the abbey, where the plot steadily thickens until he’s led to ask how “an old recipe for Chartreuse” can possibly be connected to “a terrorist plot to poison Québec’s drinking water.” That’s a great question, and answering it will take the second half of this story, which spins ever more intricate connections among leading players that become deeply unsettling.

One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.

Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024

ISBN: 9781250328137

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Minotaur

Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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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