An overdose of subplots blunts the impact of the main event.
St. Denis chief of police Bruno Courreges helps his mentor solve a case that’s puzzled him for decades.
Chief Detective Jalipeau, known to his closest friends as J-J, keeps a skull on his desk in the South of France. Not as a memento mori but as a reminder that as far as he’s risen, there’s still one case—his first—that he’s been unable to solve. Then Bruno gets a brain wave. While looking at displays of Neanderthals in the local museum, he wonders: Why can’t whoever restored these primitive folk help J-J reconstruct Oscar, as he calls his bony souvenir? Bruno tracks down anthropologist Elisabeth Daynès, who recommends Virginie, a graduate student who’s ready for a new challenge. While Virginie is hard at work re-creating Oscar’s musculature, Bruno has a second idea. Why not trace Oscar’s DNA through modern data banks? He quickly gets a hit and just as quickly hits a wall. Oscar had a son, a soldier named Louis Castignac, who was recently killed in action in Mali. As Castignac’s half sister, Sabine, who happens to be a gendarme, helps Bruno try to figure out who her brother's biological father was, Bruno deals with a host of other entanglements. His cousin Alain is getting married. His basset hound, Balzac, has just sired a litter, and he wants to choose two perfect homes for the puppies he will receive as a stud fee. His journalist friends Gilles and Jacqueline have caused a stir by publishing articles about the Rosenholz dossier, a secret document containing names of French agents who worked for the Stasi. Perhaps most urgent, drought has threatened St. Denis with wildfires, and Bruno must band together with the other villagers to protect their farms and their homes.
An overdose of subplots blunts the impact of the main event.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-65667-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
Middling for an excellent series determined to drain the swamp of Washington state.
A late-night call from an old deputy of her late father’s sends a lame-duck sheriff hurtling into a disaster it will take her friend Det. Tracy Crosswhite to pull her out of.
Before his death, Buzz Almond served as sheriff of Klickitat County, Washington, for more than two decades. Now that his daughter, Jenny Almond, has lost her reelection bid, she’s waiting for the clock to tick down to her last day—but then she gets a call on her home phone that she can’t ignore. “I need to talk to Buzz,” says Anthony Alvarez, who’s been suffering from PTSD ever since his return from Vietnam. Since her father can’t, Jenny feels she has to respond herself, and her lightning-fast visit to Alvarez ends with him shot dead and her arrested for his murder. Tracy, a police academy classmate of Jenny’s, high-tails it up from Seattle along with her husband, attorney Dan O’Leary, who agrees to take on Jenny’s defense. It’s a challenging case because it’s obvious that the overwhelmed Jenny shot an unarmed Alvarez in the chest. She insists that she didn’t fire a second shot into his back, but the local police can’t find any evidence that anyone else was on the scene. Even if they could, they’d rather convict Jenny than follow up on her increasingly heated insistence that Alvarez, a person of interest in the disappearance of 15-year-old babysitter Jacquelyn Parker back in 1980, was killed because of new evidence he’d uncovered in that 45-year-old crime. As usual, Dugoni unfolds the complications in a steady stream in and out of the courtroom, and the denouement, though not exactly surprising, is highly satisfying.
Middling for an excellent series determined to drain the swamp of Washington state.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781662524752
Page Count: 415
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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