Matthew Scudder's exceptionally gripping eighth outing finds the unlicensed, alcoholic Gotham p.i. (Out on the Cutting Edge, 1988, etc.) pitted against a human monster. The trouble starts when Matt's friend, call-girl Elaine Mardell, is mailed a clipping on the mass murder/suicide of an Ohio family. Only one man, Elaine reasons, could have sent the clipping, because only he could know that the slain wife was once Elaine's fellow hooker: James Leo Motley, a sadistic, necrophiliac psycho just released from a prison sentence that Matt and Elaine framed him into 12 years before. When Matt gets an identical clipping, he too is convinced that Motley killed the family, and he flies to Ohio to try—with little success—to convince the local police of the same. Returning to New York, Matt plunges into hell: a vengeful Motley is stalking and killing women tied to Matt, however loosely. The maniac throws one of Matt's A.A. friends from a 22-story window, then savages a woman with the last name of Scudder, no relation. Despairing, Matt loses his edge and is lured into an abandoned lot where Motley tortures him—and leaves him slinking off for a bottle of bourbon. But rage replaces thirst: Matt goes out and beats up an obnoxious punk, then hangs out with friend Mickey Ballou, a career criminal. The rage becomes fierce when Matt learns that Motley has rope-tortured Elaine to the edge of death, leading the p.i. to dispense vigilante justice in a brutal, shocking conclusion. More thriller than mystery, and a powerful one: with Motley a kind of absolute evil against which Matt measures his own frailities and strengths, this sensitive and entertaining case is the series' richest since Eight Million Ways to Die—a must for Block/ Scudder fans.
Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1990
ISBN: 0380709945
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1990
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE
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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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
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Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Categories: GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE
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