Pryor lays it on thick: Hugo and Tom act out with frat-boy glee, the Rioja flows, and the Spanish authorities assign only...
The head of security at the U.S. Embassy in Paris explores Barcelona in search of a wannabe model.
Hugo Marston (The Button Man, 2014, etc.) is looking forward to some pancakes and bacon with his friend Bart Denum’s stepdaughter, Amy Dreiss, at Breakfast in America, Paris’s trendy answer to IHOP. What he gets is stood up. No call, no text, no Amy. Worried, he checks Amy’s Marais apartment, where a neighbor tells him to check the Club Caterina in Pigalle. Instead of modeling, Amy’s stripping, and she’s left the country with Rubén Castañeda, of Estruch Entertainment Enterprises, who’s promised her a better job in Spain. So Hugo heads south with his best friend, Tom Green, a freelance, free-drinking CIA agent who just can’t help pissing off the cops. Green has a pied-à-terre in Barcelona the CIA will let them use, and pretty soon the two of them find Castañeda’s body on the floor of his apartment. Tom does his best to annoy the local police by dragging his gun into the station, but Chief Inspector Bartoli Garcia, an old friend of Hugo’s, gives the American the Spanish equivalent of carte blanche to run the investigation. Focusing on Castañeda’s colleagues—smart Nisha Bhandari, aristocratic Leo Baresetti, and geeky Todd Finch—Hugo tries to connect the dots between Estruch and Los Matadorés, a shadowy prison gang that may be responsible for the bull’s head drawn in blood over Castañeda’s body. But when a second corpse appears, he fears that time may be running out for Amy.
Pryor lays it on thick: Hugo and Tom act out with frat-boy glee, the Rioja flows, and the Spanish authorities assign only English-speaking detectives for the convenience of their American chums. Strictly for those who think espionage is like Club Med without the beads.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63388-002-3
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
By turns grim and giddy, this is a good read in the service of dark cops.
Savage dope dealers, dirty cops, corrupt officials, and a few hapless civilians mix it up in New York City.
After The Cartel (2015), Winslow follows the drug trade onto the streets. The Manhattan North Special Task Force is a lightly supervised assemblage of “the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, the best, the baddest” cops in the NYPD, and Denny Malone commands a happily representative task force squad: his boyhood pal Phil Russo; big, black Bill Montague, who dresses like an Ivy League professor; and Billy O’Neill, the youngest. The book opens with Malone in a federal lockup—how he got there unfolds in breakneck flashbacks told in the cadences and vocabulary of a cop’s speech. The pivotal, but by no means the first, of his many indiscretions is skimming $4 million and 20 kilos of heroin from the scene of a major bust. He also executes the kingpin, and in the raid, Billy is killed. The narrative picks up five months later, and the legal and extralegal exploits of the task force are detailed. The reader is asked to admire the effectiveness of their policing while condemning their methods—Joseph Wambaugh did it better. Malone’s brother, Liam, a firefighter, was killed on 9/11, and that horrific disaster for first responders forms a grim attitudinal backdrop to their days. Malone and the boys are dirty cops: they take and deliver payoffs, ignore the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement, and administer crude vigilante justice. Drugs are gotten off the street, though some may go up their noses or into their lungs. Eventually Malone is trapped, caught on tape offering to broker a payoff to an assistant district attorney. He cuts a deal to name lawyers but not cops, but corrupt prosecutors and deceitful administrators confound him. His alternatives shrink; more deals are made and abrogated. Are Malone’s crimes an inescapable consequence of his working conditions? Must the police break the law to keep the peace?
By turns grim and giddy, this is a good read in the service of dark cops.Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-266441-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
Nearly as many recipes as Joy of Cooking, and about as much narrative.
A baker helps solve her sister’s boyfriend’s classmate’s murder.
Hannah Swensen is suffering from stress due to a trauma incurred in her last adventure (Chocolate Cream Pie Murder, 2019) but alluded to only in the most elliptical terms in her current entry. Hannah’s stepfather, Doc Knight, is adamant: She must leave at once for vacation. He sends Hannah and her mom off to California for a stress-free holiday helping Hannah’s college friend Lynne Larchmont pack up her palatial home and move back to Lake Eden, Minnesota, where Hannah’s shop, The Cookie Jar, provides sweet treats for all. A New York minute after she arrives in Los Angeles, Hannah receives a hysterical call from her sister, Michelle. Michelle’s boyfriend, Lonnie, is the main suspect in the murder of Darcy Hicks, an old friend from high school. Since Lonnie is one of Lake Eden’s handful of police detectives, everyone else on the force is deemed ineligible to conduct the investigation, leaving only amateur sleuth Hannah to crack the case. Hannah moves back in, platonically of course, with her old flame Norman Rhodes, since her Lake Eden condo was the scene of that unspecified trauma and her husband, Ross Barton, has disappeared, or died, or maybe killed somebody—it’s not quite clear which. Hannah begins her investigation by checking out Brian and Cassie Polinski, who were with Darcy and Lonnie at the Double Eagle, a dive bar, the night of her death. But it’s hard for her inquiry to build up any steam because almost every chapter ends with copious directions for making another nifty treat, complete with tips on which brands to use, advice about where to buy the ingredients, and little anecdotes about the people who feast on the finished products.
Nearly as many recipes as Joy of Cooking, and about as much narrative.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1889-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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