A shrewd and energetic mystery series installment.
A capital murder trial stirs up a former judge’s murky past in Ruhl’s thriller sequel.
After helping to dismantle a drug cartel, Ben Joel has spent the last couple of years hiding with his family. But a hit man named Geronimo, who helped him in the past, tracks him down in the present to ask for a favor. He wants to pay Ben handsomely to represent Mia Delarosa, who’s in jail for the ax murder of a retired cop and alleged child molester. Ben has barely started digging into Mia’s case in Kansas, where he’d once been a lawyer and a judge, when he chances upon a drug addict who claims to recognize him. The man claims it wasn’t a heroin overdose that killed Ben’s mother 27 years ago—it was cops whom he won’t name. After Ben spots ties between his own past and Mia’s present, he starts hunting for more evidence and runs into more crime, including potential human trafficking and multiple murders. It’s hardly surprising when it turns out that someone has put a target on his back. This second series installment features a large cast, including a government agent who’s investigating both a recent murder and events from the earlier Ben-centric novel, and a billionaire socialite who may have killed Ben’s dad. Ruhl, the author of Verdict Denied (2021), deftly juggles the many players involved, many of whom Ben doesn’t know well or can’t fully trust, including the hit man who kicks everything off. They’re all connected to compelling mysteries regarding, for example, what really happened to Ben’s mom and the identity of Mia’s reputed accomplice. The author loads his pages with sharp, rapid-fire dialogue (“‘What happened?’ ‘Fight.’ ‘You win?’ ‘No one did.’ ‘No one ever does’”). But he also grounds the story in the real-life 21st-century pandemic; Ben argues remotely at a Zoom hearing as anxious defendants “play the Covid card” to manipulate proceedings. This tale delivers unexpected shocks, as well, even before the final act and gratifying denouement.
A shrewd and energetic mystery series installment.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 497
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
A page-turning thriller that combines a touch of magic with deep love for the natural world.
An epic battle between good and evil with a mystic twist.
When she was 10, Vida visited a fortuneteller who presented her with two broadly different futures and prophesied that she’d be “a champion of the natural world and all its beauty.” Now Vida, raised by her late great-uncle Ogden in a remote cabin surround by the beauties of nature, has no fear of wild animals, including the wolves led by her friend Lupo. Taught by Ogden, Vida, who has a special talent for dredging up gemstones, makes a living by means of a placer mine in a nearby river on government land. Her lover, school principal and activist José Nochelobo, dies in what seems to be an accident but turns out to have been murder. Terrence Boschvark, a wealthy psychopath who’ll stop at nothing to develop some nearby land, is behind the evil doings near her home. Vida, certain that someone is watching her, patiently waits for him to show himself. When he does, he turns out to be deputy sheriff Nash Deacon, who accuses her of killing his cousin Belden Bead and demands that she surrender to him body and soul. Deacon plays a game of sexual terrorism with Vida, who watched his drug-dealing cousin die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound and buried him and his car with her uncle’s backhoe. Now she plans for Deacon to be next. Once she kills and buries Deacon and his car, Vida becomes the subject of a manhunt by Boschvark’s remorseless killers. The mystical forces within her lead her to a place of hope. With some help from two native people and a tracker hired to find her, she fights for her life.
A page-turning thriller that combines a touch of magic with deep love for the natural world.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781662500510
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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