Like its characters, this mystery is engaging, compelling, and rough around the edges.
Members of an Oklahoma family trying to recover from tragedy reel from the news that the incarcerated relative who terrorized them is being released from prison.
In this third installment of Lipinski’s mystery series, Zane Clearwater, six weeks into police training, learns that his half brother, Clyde Doom, will get out of prison to await a new trial. Clyde had been convicted of kidnapping Zane’s sister, Lettie, now 16 years old and pregnant. Clyde’s conviction was overturned on a technicality. Oklahoma’s 2020 McGirt ruling will allow Clyde to be out on bail before a new trial because, like Zane, he is part Cherokee, and the crime occurred within Native American borders when he was a juvenile. Zane lives in a mobile home with his grandmother Verda, Lettie, and the teen’s boyfriend, Angel. After learning of Clyde’s upcoming release, Lettie gets spooked when she receives a baby rattle from an anonymous sender, and the police academy suspends Zane because he’s accused of selling meth. Someone seems to be working with still-incarcerated Clyde to upset the family members and probably hurt them in retribution for past events. To protect his family, Zane adopts a big guard dog and engages in what Angel calls “hillbilly security”: placing junkyard metal around the trailer’s perimeter that will “make it noisy for an intruder to come near.” Zane’s girlfriend, Tiffany, assists in setting up a video and lighting security system. Along with these measures, Zane fights feelings of violence, which plagued him in the past, as they continue to ramp up. In this captivating tale, descriptions are often vivid and precise, such as that of a woman with spidery clots of mascara-laden eyelashes and a man whose “mouth pinched like he was sucking food out of his teeth.” But they can be clunky, too: “Hearing his current girlfriend’s name brought her face and smile into his mind.” Reading this series in order would be preferable, as incidents from the players’ brutal pasts are jarring to read in summarized sentences. Still, this gripping installment features a cast of intriguing characters and a memorable, complex hero. In addition, the tale is timely, with a reference to Covid-19 and pro and con stances on policing.
Like its characters, this mystery is engaging, compelling, and rough around the edges.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 274
Publisher: Majestic Content Los Angeles
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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