No sophomore jinx for Clark. Her second girlfriend novel, counterpart to the buddy novel, is serious fun.
From former L.A. Prosecuting Attorney Clark (the O.J. Simpson case), an engaging revisit to Rachel Knight, L.A. prosecuting attorney.
Rachel Knight (Guilt by Association, 2011), star performer in L.A.’s elite Special Trials Unit, is famous for not suffering fools lightly. And for mouthiness. Those who love Rachel delight in the volatility implied here since her periodic explosions have in the past transmuted the dull and ordinary into the bright stuff of legends. Those who do not love Rachel—the always “carefully coiffed,” ever resentful Brandon Averill, for instance—mutter, sputter and often enough find icky little ways to complicate her life, even if inadvertently. So it is on the day Averill’s prosecutorial ineptitude adds a botched case to Rachel’s already jampacked list. It turns out, however, that the case has unexpected permutations, challenging to put it mildly. Seemingly routine at first, it involves the murder of an unidentified homeless man, another way of saying back burner. But when John Doe becomes Simon Bayer, younger brother of a police officer brutally slain a year earlier, Rachel has on her hands a homicide of a far different color. As always when difficulties loom—knotty professional issues, gnarly romantic entanglements—she calls on the small support cohort she thinks of as her “besties”: Det. Bailey Keller, tough, smart and gorgeous; and counselor Toni LaCollette, tough, smart, black and gorgeous. As the investigation deepens, the Bayer case assumes a mazelike pattern with frustrated Rachel always at least one twist behind—until suddenly, shockingly, she gets the insight that changes everything. The shrewd, coldblooded, elusive killer Rachel’s been pursuing up to now has developed an interesting new target: Rachel.
No sophomore jinx for Clark. Her second girlfriend novel, counterpart to the buddy novel, is serious fun.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-12953-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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