A crime tale with an engaging setting and some intriguing characters that loses ground in the final stretch.
In Black’s mystery novel, a captivating horse sparks rivalries in the horse-racing world that have deadly consequences.
Natalie and Jeff Frazier have had some success as thoroughbred racehorse owners on their local California circuit. Natalie’s favorite horse, FraziersFury, or “Fury” for short, is their most exciting colt—one that has the potential to qualify for the coveted Million Dollar Derby. Other racing enthusiasts are interested in the horse, including Angie McCoy, a jockey who’s decided that Fury must be hers at any cost. Natalie resists the lucrative offers, unknowingly putting herself, her husband, and Fury’s dedicated handlers in danger. A series of unusual happenings occurs, including a break-in at the barn where Fury is kept, a kidnapping, and eventually, an unexpected murder. The Fury team find themselves drawn into the investigation, and members of their community reveal themselves as backstabbers and blackmailers. But who did the dirtiest of the dirty work—and how far will that person go to cover their tracks? Over the course of the novel, Black shows extensive expertise about racehorses and the world of those who love them, and her descriptions of Fury’s angulation and conditioning show the obsession with detail that drives thoroughbred enthusiasts. Among that group, Angie is the author’s most thrilling creation as someone who’s unafraid to use force to get what she wants, and she serves as an effective foil to the sweet-natured Natalie. However, when Angie is absent from the story, it turns into a more standard whodunit, and the book as a whole loses a great deal of momentum.
A crime tale with an engaging setting and some intriguing characters that loses ground in the final stretch.Pub Date: March 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-975790-12-7
Page Count: 318
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best news: The year goes on long enough for the hero to be reinstated. Whew!
Maine game warden Mike Bowditch’s 34th year proves to be his most eventful ever.
It begins when Mike, newly demoted from investigator, sees flames half a mile away and rushes into a burning house, where he’s too late to rescue Jenna Malloy or her husband, gym owner Brian. The only survivor is a baby girl Mike finds in the arms of a neighbor, Karen Kershaw. Waldo County Sheriff’s Deputy Chet Bessel’s reaction to the tragedy tells Mike the deaths won’t be widely mourned. They’re not the only ones that won’t. Soon afterward, the discovery of Axl Deming’s body on the railroad tracks suggests that whoever killed the presumed rapist and murderer of teenager Emily Crockett is bent on vigilante justice. Since the victims are “two of the most hated people in Maine—three if you count Jenna Malloy,” suspects would seem to be everywhere. Mike, repeatedly warned off the case because he’s no longer an investigator, can’t resist focusing on Karen Kershaw, who fled the scene while he was questioning her, and Edward Gudgeon, a scallop diver who frequented the same bar as Axl and his ex-con brother, Shayn. Mike’s on the right track, but his quest will take a twisty route through many more ambushes, confrontations, brushes with fellow law officers who end up suspending him, and threats to his wife, EMT Stacey Stevens, and their newborn son, Charles. Doiron tightens this web with an insistent mastery that will keep most readers from noticing just how far-reaching it is until they’ve gained the end and can take some deep, cleansing breaths.
The best news: The year goes on long enough for the hero to be reinstated. Whew!Pub Date: June 30, 2026
ISBN: 9781250864451
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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