Another heady Irish stew spiked with wayward epigrams, one-word paragraphs, and lots and lots of Jamesons. Sláinte.
Galway private eye Jack Taylor finds himself awash in miracles, and not the good kind.
The whole city is abuzz with the news of "the miracle”—the spotting of a young girl bathed in an unearthly blue light that evokes Lourdes and Fatima. Jack is the beneficiary of a miracle of his own, a close encounter with a Mack truck that spared him but brought him into close contact with the miracle girl, Sara, who was trying to rob him as he regained consciousness. Jack emerges from the hospital to a raft of cases. Renee Garvey begs him to stop the husband who beats her and has now started beating their daughter. Stephen Morgan wants him to identify the online troll who drove his daughter to suicide. And Monsignor Rael, an investigator called in from Rome, wants him to find and quiet Sara because “the Church does not wish a miracle at this time.” Jack, more interested in a rash of fires set by wealthy forensic accountant Benjamin J. Cullen, asks his farmer/biker/falconer friend Keefer McDonald to help him whittle down the caseload. In shockingly fast succession, the docket is indeed diminished—not by the efforts of Jack and Keefer but by jolts of violence that claim a remarkable number of the very characters who seem to be driving the story. Eventually Jack, emerging from a lost weekend that extends to five or six days (naturally, he can’t remember), grabs the reins and takes control. Or does he?
Another heady Irish stew spiked with wayward epigrams, one-word paragraphs, and lots and lots of Jamesons. Sláinte.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5703-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
IN THE NEWS
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Excitement for series fans looking to revisit Bentz and Montoya’s greatest hits while promising something new for the future.
Is the potential return of a series villain the end for a clever detective and his daughter, a true-crime author, in the last book in Jackson’s Rick Bentz and Reuben Montoya series?
On the streets of the French Quarter of New Orleans, an unnamed killer is plotting his next crime with satisfaction. He’s been waiting a long time to go after Kristi Bentz and end her string of true-crime bestsellers. But when the murderer makes his move, he’s thrown off course by the unexpected arrival of Kristi’s husband, Jay McKnight. In the ensuing struggle, Jay is killed and Kristi left in shock. Her father, Det. Rick Bentz, wants to comfort his daughter, but he and partner Det. Reuben Montoya have other things to worry about when an earlier case resurfaces in a way that seems impossible. They’d thought Father John, a fake priest obsessed with killing women in the name of God, was dead after their last face-off, but their most recent string of cases follow his M.O. to a T: working girls choked to death by a string of sharpened rosary beads. Is Father John back, or do Bentz and Montoya have a copycat on their hands? The case is clearly linked to Kristi, who wrote a hit book on the so-called Rosary Killer and whose agent is demanding she do press and a follow-up volume. As Kristi worries that the unnamed killer may just be waiting to strike again, help arrives in the form of mysterious stranger Cruz Montoya, Reuben’s brother, who may need Kristi’s help.
Excitement for series fans looking to revisit Bentz and Montoya’s greatest hits while promising something new for the future.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9781496739056
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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