A sharply crafted, engaging thriller with a healthy shot of adrenaline.
This novel finds a widower bumping heads with mobsters and crooked law enforcers as he rushes to save his abducted daughter.
Ex-lawyer Nick Ceratto loses his beloved wife, Grace, to cancer. He leaves Nantucket and returns to their Philadelphia home with the couple’s 12-year-old daughter, Starr. Grace’s funeral happens to coincide with the New Year’s Day Mummers Parade, where Nick loses Starr among the jam-packed crowds. When it’s clear someone has kidnapped the tween, the FBI arrives, including profiler Carmen Lopez (“I’m going to psych out the who, what, when, where, and why of this crime, which might allow us to bring back your daughter”). The agent has a startling connection to Nick, as she blames him for causing her mother’s death and nearly getting Carmen and her sister killed. But the abduction case only becomes more bizarre; Nick seeks unlikely help from a mob boss while several individuals aren’t who they appear to be, from police officers to Grace’s family, which Nick has only just met. As authorities suspect sex traffickers have the girl, Nick, Carmen, and others frantically search for Starr before she’s sold. But there’s a much deeper conspiracy at play, which involves a veritable horde of people. Rizio’s fast-paced thriller sequel is nothing short of exhilarating. Nick and Carmen repeatedly find themselves in harrowing circumstances, as a bevy of dubious types—and not just gangsters—ignites twists throughout. This practically necessitates a huge cast, which the author gradually and masterfully introduces without ever easing off the narrative’s accelerator. Some of the plot ties to Rizio’s preceding Nick-centric book, Blood Money (2011), but those threads are subtly incorporated to cater to all readers. Though he’s returning, Nick, like many of the other male characters, isn’t particularly likable; he’s hotheaded, and he often comes across as incompetent while scouring Philadelphia for his daughter. In contrast, the women shine gloriously, especially quick-witted Carmen and the equally shrewd, wise-cracking police detective Rose Formosa. Considering the genre, readers should expect loads of violence, deaths, and profanity-laced dialogue.
A sharply crafted, engaging thriller with a healthy shot of adrenaline.Pub Date: April 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1984227348
Page Count: 273
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.
A series of mounting complications leads to yet another fight to the death between the discarded intelligence agents of Slough House and the morally bankrupt head of MI5.
As Jackson Lamb’s motley crew on Aldersgate Street struggles to cope with the deaths of River Cartwright’s grandfather and mentor, intelligence veteran David Cartwright, and their dim, beloved colleague Min Harper, new troubles are brewing. Diana Taverner, who runs the British Intelligence Service from Regent’s Park, is being blackmailed by former MP Peter Judd to do his bidding. Nothing untoward about that, of course, but this time, Judd’s demands, backed by a compromising tape recording, are more pressing than usual. So Diana reconvenes the Brains Trust—Al Hawke, Avril Potts, Daisy Wessex, and their ex-boss Charles Cornell Stamoran—whose last assignment was to serve as the contact for psychopathic IRA informant Dougie Malone while turning a blind eye to his multiple rapes and murders, which were really none of the Crown’s business. Taverner’s new assignment for the Brains Trust is the assassination of Judd. Since all these developments are filtered through the riotously cynical lens of Herron’s imagination, nothing goes as planned, and when the smoke clears, the fatalities don’t include Judd. Now that Judd knows he has as much reason to fear Taverner as she does to fear him, Lamb offers to broker a peace meeting between them which Slough House computer geek Roddy Ho will keep secret by knocking out 37 security cameras around Taverner’s dwelling. What could possibly go wrong?
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781641297264
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PROFILES
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