A riveting crime tale with a surprisingly effective multigenre approach.
A mobster has little time to find a kidnapped girl, thwart child sex traffickers, and prove himself innocent of murder in this sequel.
When someone abducts the granddaughter of Shinzo Tanaka, the Tanaka syndicate leader seeks help from Levi Yoder. A fixer for the Mafia’s Bianchi family in New York, Levi doesn’t initially know why Tanaka chose him to track down 5-year-old June. She’s the daughter of Tanaka’s dead son, Jun, and lives with her mom, Helen, in Maryland. The search for June is barely under way when feds pick up Levi and accuse him of murdering three FBI agents. They have no real evidence, but Levi agrees to be a cooperating witness and assist in finding the true killer. Meanwhile, June’s kidnapper demands $10 million within two weeks or Helen will never see her daughter again. Complicating matters is Levi’s personal mission to get abused immigrant children off the streets, provide them shelter, and help them secure U.S. citizenship. This ultimately results in threats from human traffickers in Flushing, Queens. But it also leads to a covert organization that wants to recruit Levi in taking down child sex traffickers, whose upcoming illicit deal will be taking place in mere weeks. Rothman (Darwin’s Cipher, 2019, etc.) deftly blends a few genres in this second installment of a series featuring Levi. The murders and abduction, for example, are shrouded in mystery while combating human traffickers generates ample action. Levi’s genius pal, Denny, shows off gadgets à la the James Bond films, with the narrative even comparing him to Q. The author deftly retains a coherent narrative by typically concentrating on one subplot at a time, like the one monopolizing the final act after another is all but resolved. With his mob ties, Levi is a flawed but likable protagonist. He’s involved in sometimes disturbingly violent deeds, but his desire to rescue children is noble. He’s also persistently cool; when an associate says Levi can’t save all the kids, he confidently responds: “I can try.”
A riveting crime tale with a surprisingly effective multigenre approach.Pub Date: March 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-09-227955-0
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
