Private investigator Luke Jacobs exposes a chilling corporate conspiracy while seeking to free a jailed lawyer friend in this latest installment of a New Orleans mystery series by Mask (The French Quarter, 2013, etc.).
Luke is excited. A key witness has come out of the woodwork, which may help his quest to free Jake Matos, a lawyer pal convicted of killing a cop after being pulled over by police over four years ago. The PI then gets a mystery summons to a meeting about Jake, only to encounter a threatening henchman. Visiting Jake in jail, Luke senses the lawyer is hiding something, perhaps scared into silence. Luke breaks into Jake’s house and finds some odd microscope slides. He asks Melvin Jenkins, a retired forensic pathologist, to examine the materials. While awaiting these findings, Luke pieces together that Jake was pursuing cases that may have posed major problems for mogul Fred Von Tepp and his Mega Alcohol Network. With further assists from his hot doctor girlfriend, a sexy Latina forensics student, a Times-Picayune journalist, a NASA scientist, and others, Luke finally exposes the stunning secret that led to a big business cover-up, police corruption, and Jake’s wrongful conviction. The Louisiana-based Mask clearly revels in his New Orleans setting. He includes loving descriptions of bayous, gardens and bars, and he presents a hip, bantering cast of racially diverse characters that reflects his city’s party spirit and melting-pot status. Mask’s core mystery also had potential as an inventive, alcoholic counterpart to tobacco company–like malfeasance. Unfortunately, the author is a bit of a victim of his own exuberance. He tosses up too many Mardi Gras beads and too many characters and subplots that are digressive or underdeveloped or both, which takes a toll on the logic and clarity of key aspects of the story. He also provides too little explanatory detail for people who haven’t read the earlier Luke Jacobs books. And while Mask’s syncopated rhythm has its pleasures, many readers may feel exhausted rather than energized by this rollicking yet tangled tale. Jazz-beat crime fiction that riffs on Big Easy flavor at the expense of a fully coherent plot.
Pub Date: June 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1456621698
Page Count: 108
Publisher: eBookIt.com
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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