An often-thrilling crime novel that explores questions of loyalty, justice, and morality.
In Wukas’ mystery, a veteran Chicago journalist thinks back to a murder case from his earliest days on the job.
Will Moore, a seasoned reporter for the Chicago Tribune, learns about the death, after a long illness, of a figure from his past—an elderly, retired Chicago police officer known as “Fuckin’ Frank” Foley, to whom he owes an unspecified debt. The story then flashes back to Will’s time as a young reporter for City News Bureau 20 years before. Will gets the job after breaking up with his girlfriend, dropping out of grad school, and, consequently, losing access to a trust fund from his wealthy family until he’s 35. Will works alongside Frank, whose intimidating presence and rigorous approach to police work leave a lasting impression on him. Around the same time, he begins a casual sexual relationship (which later becomes more complicated) with artist Mimi Brickman, and meets Terry Meyer, a pharmacist who illegally sells drugs to locals, including Will, who uses amphetamines to keep up with his job’s late hours. Will covers crime stories for the City News Bureau, but things get personal when his neighbor is murdered, and locals approach Will for help in avenging his neighbor’s death. Overall, Wukas succeeds in creating sympathetic characters that have exceptional depth; Will and Frank talk about the subjectivity of good and evil and how both police work and reporting are subject to biases. Additionally, the detailed descriptions of Chicago give the work a feeling of verisimilitude and paint a vivid picture of the city: “I quickly found sanctuary in the gray and green of the university neighborhood’s imposing limestone and ancient oaks on streets with wonderful names like Kimbark, Blackstone and Drexel.” However, other moments feel heavy-handed, leaning too heavily on Will’s background as a student majoring in the classics and quoting various philosophers in their native Greek and Latin. Still, the relationships between the characters remain dynamic, and the story’s mystery elements are well executed throughout.
An often-thrilling crime novel that explores questions of loyalty, justice, and morality.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798990463998
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Eckhartz Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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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