In Lepie’s debut mystery, the murder of an undercover cop gives police detective Lotus Williams a chance to resuscitate her career.
Williams has been watching soaps and smoking marijuana ever since cancer killed her daughter, Jewel, but her use of cocaine cost her her job at the Lofton, New York, police department. She gets clean after an old friend, a cop named Jimmy O’Roark, arrives on her doorstep. It turns out that Francesca Corelli, the charismatic, beautiful police chief of the town of New Parise, is offering her a fresh start. Williams soon delves into an investigation of the death of an undercover officer who’d been embedded in the town’s leading drug gang, run by an African-American albino man named Charles Himmel, also known as Snow Black. One of Williams’ old Vassar classmates, Vanessa King, lived out Williams’ dream of graduating from Harvard Law, but a law partner’s racial slur prompted her to work for Himmel. King argues that Himmel brings work and money to the black community by supplying a consumer good. (It’s a drug-lord-as-CEO model that’s similar to the one personified by Stringer Bell in the TV show The Wire.) King accuses the local mob, run by Pauli Trinceri, of killing the cop; they’re also suspected in the murder of Corelli’s father, the previous police chief. Jean “Zazz” Zazzinsky, a lesbian reporter fired from the local newspaper, is investigating that crime, despite Corelli’s antagonism; depending on who’s telling the story, Zazz is unhinged and obsessed with Francesca Corelli, or a threat to a powerful woman who has something to hide. The first-person narration shifts between various characters, including Williams, Zazz, other police officers and Butch Roman, the chief’s Italian-American bodybuilder lover. They speak as if to an off-screen interviewer, but the narrative transitions can sometimes be jarring and awkward. Although the storyline feels like a mashup of familiar mobster and gangster plots, its awareness of race, gender and sexual orientation shades it with greater depth. Williams, meanwhile, comes off as both soulful and hard-boiled, a woman who’s suffered, yet still strives to do right in a compromised world.
A standard-issue noir tale featuring a nonstandard detective.
Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490566467
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Treasure Chest Press
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Adams (Peach Pies and Alibis, 2013) kicks off a new series featuring strong women, a touch of romance and mysticism, and...
Four women with hidden secrets form a group to combat deceit and solve murders.
The ladies of Miracle Springs work in mysterious ways. Former librarian Nora Pennington, owner of Miracle Books, helps people deal with their troubles by recommending specific reading material. Hester Winthrop, owner and baker at the Gingerbread House, creates scones individually tailored to different people’s needs. Estella Sadler, owner of Magnolia Salon and Spa, is a high-maintenance gal with a bad reputation with men. Quiet June Dixon works at the Miracle Springs thermal pools. All are haunted by terrible events that continue to cast long shadows. The ladies’ passing acquaintance with one another deepens when Neil Parrish, a man who’d chatted with Nora and bought a scone from Hester, falls or is pushed in front of a train. After Sheriff Todd calls them in for interviews because they’d all spoken with the dead man, they confide in each other their suspicions that Parrish was murdered despite the sheriff’s ready assumption that his death was suicide. Parrish was one of the partners in Pine Ridge Properties, a new housing development going up near Mineral Springs, and June, who talked to him at the pools, said he seemed to have regrets about the project. Incensed by the way the misogynist sheriff treats them, the ladies form a secret society to investigate. When Nora expresses interest in buying a house in Pine Ridge, she’s surprised to learn that she qualifies for a loan from the local bank run by the sheriff’s brother. As the ladies investigate, another partner in the suspicious building project is killed, and Estella is arrested for his murder. Now the friends are even more determined to discover the truth.
Adams (Peach Pies and Alibis, 2013) kicks off a new series featuring strong women, a touch of romance and mysticism, and both the cunning present-day mystery and the slowly revealed secrets of the intriguing heroines’ pasts.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1237-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Koontz widens his canvas dramatically while dimming the hard brilliance common to his shorter winners:1995’s taut masterpiece, Intensity, and 1998’s moon-drenched midsummer nightmare, Seize the Night. This time the author takes up mind control, wiring his tale into the brainwashing epics The Manchurian Candidate and last spring’s film The Matrix. The laser-beam brightness of his earlier bestsellers fades, however, as he stuffs each scene with draining chitchat and extra plotting that seldom rings with novelty. Martine “Martie” Rhodes, a video-game designer, has developed a rare mental disorder: autophobia, fear of oneself. Meanwhile, her husband Dusty’s young half-brother, Skeet Caulfield, has decided to jump off the roof of a building the two men are repairing—because Skeet has seen the Angel of the next world, who has revealed that things are pretty wonderful there, and he wants to come on over. Martie’s best friend, real-estate agent Susan Jagger, is newly coping with agoraphobia, fear of the outdoors. What’s more, Susan knows she’s being visited and raped at night by her separated husband, Eric, although all her doors and windows are locked. She can’t remember these rapes, but her panties are stained with semen. So when she sets up a camcorder to record her sleeping hours, she gets a huge surprise after viewing the tape. How these mental and physical events have come about—ditto the psychiatric background of the Keanuphobe millionairess who shows up (yes! she fears Keanu Reeves)—has something to do with the ladies’ psychiatrist, Dr. Mark Ahriman, the son of a famous dead movie director whose eyes the doctor keeps in a bottle of formaldehyde and studies, in hopes of siphoning off Dad’s inspiration. Although the whole story could have been told to better effect in 300 pages, Koontz deftly sidesteps clichÇs of expression while nonetheless applying an air pump to the suspense: an MO that keeps his yearly 17-million book sales afloat.
Pub Date: Dec. 28, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10666-X
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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