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AGATES ARE FOREVER

A NICK CAMERON MYSTERY

An engaging mix of humor, mystery, history, and geologic curiosities.

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Old treasure, murder, and beautiful women send a geologist across the Arizona desert into Mexico in Terret’s mystery.

Nick Cameron, a “consulting geologist,” is having dinner in a “desiccated dump in the flat Sonoran Desert” in Arizona when in walks Theo, a dame “hotter than a Soviet drill bit at the bottom of the Kola Superdeep Borehole.” She’s got “emerald eyes,” “marathoner thighs,” “stratovolcano breasts,” a stash of valuable agates of mysterious origin, and a Smith & Wesson snub-nosed revolver. “This dame knows what she’s doing,” Nick says to the reader, who is cast in the role of confidant; it’s a tricky literary device that, for the most part, the author pulls off. Soon, Nick is embroiled in a mystery involving the agates’ provenance, crooked marketing consultants, plundered museum funds, a beautiful industrial spy, a treasure-trove of Mexican gold ore with historic connections to Pancho Villa, and a “homicidal hobo” intent on making Nick his next victim. Terret successfully weaves the disparate threads of the complicated plot together, layering the narrative with fascinating, well-informed geological references and leavening the proceedings with humor, evoking the lingo and brash attitudes of old detective pulp fiction novels throughout. Women are “dames” (and mostly set dressing), their legs are “gams,” guns are “roscoes,”, and murder victims are “whacked.” The author conveys real feeling with Nick’s origin story: At age 13, he discovered his grandfather’s stash of 1950s detective novels, and the two bonded over their mutual enjoyment of the genre, using the books’ tough-guy lingo whenever they got together until the older man’s death. Terret falters, though, when Nick’s enigmatic friend Frankie, a Navajo-Italian jewelry designer who calls the shots in the multi-pronged investigation, briefly takes over the narrative from Nick to explain his actions—this sudden switch breaks Nick’s conversational connection with the reader and undercuts Frankie’s mystique with unnecessary exposition. The text includes Nick’s clue lists and a few line drawings of code symbols, floor plans, and landscapes to clarify plot points and add visual interest.

An engaging mix of humor, mystery, history, and geologic curiosities.

Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025

ISBN: 9781684632886

Page Count: 280

Publisher: SparkPress

Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2024

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PRESUMED GUILTY

An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.

Having been falsely convicted of murder himself years ago, prosecutor Rusty Sabich defies common wisdom in defending his romantic partner’s adopted son against the same accusation.

Now 76, Rusty has retired to the (fictitious) Skageon Region in the upper Midwest, far removed from Kindle County, Turow’s Chicago stand-in, where he was a star attorney and judge. Aaron Housley, a Black man raised in a bleached rural environment, has had his troubles, including serving four months for holding drugs purchased by Mae Potter, his erratic, on-and-off girlfriend. Now, after suddenly disappearing to parts unknown with her, he returns alone. When days go by without Mae’s reappearance, it is widely assumed that Aaron harmed her. Why else would he be in possession of her phone? Following the discovery of Mae’s strangled body and incriminating evidence that points to Aaron, Rusty steps in. Opposed in court by the uncontrollable, gloriously named prosecutor Hiram Jackdorp, he fears he’s in a lose-lose situation. If he fails to get Aaron off, which is highly possible, the boy’s mother, Bea, will never forgive him. If Rusty wins the case, the quietly detached Bea—who, like half the town, has secrets—will have trouble living with the unsparing methods Rusty uses to free Aaron. In attempting to match, or at least approach, the brilliance of his groundbreaking masterpiece Presumed Innocent (1987), Turow has his own odds to overcome. No minor achievement like a previous follow-up, Innocent (2010), the new novel is a powerful display of straightforward narrative, stuffed with compelling descriptions of people, places, and the legal process. No one stages courtroom scenes better than this celebrated Chicago attorney. But the book, whose overly long scenes add up to more than 500 pages, mostly lacks the gripping intensity and high moral drama to keep those pages turning. It’s an absorbing and entertaining read, but Turow’s fans have come to expect more than that.

An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.

Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025

ISBN: 9781538706367

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

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