A gritty, assured mystery debut, right up to its satisfying final notes.
A disheartened private eye does a favor that puts him on wrong side of a dangerous criminal organization in Vaughn’s crime novel.
In 2017 middle-aged Los Angeles private investigator Ellis Dunaway hasn’t had a decent case in ages. His secretary, Reshma, is likely to quit soon, and his once-promising career as a TV writer is so far in the past, it feels like it never happened. He can’t help but keep tabs on Kent Moran, a writer friend who seems to accrue accolades by the day, while Ellis just accrues debt and regret. When a nightclub-owning acquaintance, Terry Montero, asks him for a favor, Ellis quickly agrees; aside from snorting cocaine and listening to pop songs on the radio of an old Porsche his dead father left him, he doesn’t have very much to do. Terry wants Ellis to check on a rental property where he allowed a colleague, Douglas Stefanidis, to crash. Terry hasn’t heard from the guy in weeks and would like to resume renting out the house if it’s empty. The search for Stefanidis becomes a wide-ranging investigation involving porn stars and local criminals who may be involved with the Black Fist—a cartel involved in money laundering, drug trafficking, and more. Vaughn’s jaded protagonist has just enough ruefulness and ambition to make this LA noir click. The pacing is brisk, and the characters are mostly entertainingly seedy. However, when Ellis shows a spark of humanity—he truly cares about his secretary’s son, for instance—the writing truly shines. Vaughn efficiently renders the California settings, although listing every song playing on the radio is almost comically overdone: “ ‘Breakout’ by Swing Out Sister. After that, ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’ by Bryan Adams came on. The song was released on two albums simultaneously in 1991….” Some chapters start with quotes from Ellis’ father, a bestselling author and private investigator. Like other aspects of the story, the father’s words ring true and evoke an era of reminiscent of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch books.
A gritty, assured mystery debut, right up to its satisfying final notes.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2023
ISBN: 979-8986531908
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Fans will relish every high-energy moment without demanding rational explanations for every detail.
A retired hit man’s wish to impress his new love leads him back into a thicket of crime and corruption.
During the dinner date they’re finally going out on, Chicago area therapist Gwendolyn Lord shares with English professor Cameron Winter a story she’s just heard from forensic psychologist Livy Swain, an old school friend, of an impossible crime. Owen McKay, arrested six months ago for killing his wife and son and crying, “It’s still there! Still there!,” was shot to death with a nail gun inside his closely watched prison cell. Though his initial reaction is idle curiosity, Winter resolves to show off his prowess to Gwendolyn by solving the mystery. Dr. Billy Whitefield, the pathologist who conducted the postmortem on McKay, shares with Winter a monstrous revelation that he’s been blackmailed into concealing: He removed a spidery attachment from McKay’s brain whose existence was deleted from the official report. After a friend at his college links the implant to Thaumatix—a company whose motto is “We’re in the business of miracles”—Winter learns of another case that sounds eerily similar: the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a Connecticut high school student by a previously inoffensive carpenter who’s killed before Winter can question him. Surrounded by assassins and amoral corporate overlords, Winter leans more and more into his relationship with Gwendolyn, though the person he most wants to talk to is the Recruiter, the nameless boss he trusted to make life-or-death decisions when he worked as a contract killer. Miraculously, the Recruiter, who’s vanished, returns to Winter’s life. But what if he can’t be trusted any more than everyone else?
Fans will relish every high-energy moment without demanding rational explanations for every detail.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781613166864
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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