Firmin’s first novel is a first-rate murder mystery.
Megan Riley’s circle of friends includes Rachel Feinman, Alexandra Grant and Kathleen Rosario—all wives of wealthy California men. Their lives revolve around the Bayside Yacht Club, their yachts and the club’s activities. But unlike her friends, Megan is working girl—she doesn’t own a yacht, makes her living selling real estate and has recently ended a serious relationship. Despite their cushy lifestyles, Megan’s friends are not without their problems; all of their marriages are in various states of decay, some in graver condition than others. While sunbathing on Alexandra’s yacht, the friends learn of the death of mutual acquaintance George Fisher; he had suffered a heart attack while in the company of a hooker. All are shocked by the news, but none are surprised. The ladies discuss their husbands’ proclivities for obtaining sexual favors through nefarious means, as well as the ladies’ shared desire to retaliate against the guys. The ladies bandy about the idea of finding a gigolo that they can share and agreed upon it—at least in principle. Meanwhile, detective Matt Donovan is busy investigating the Bondage Murder, a grisly case in which a prostitute’s mutilated body was found near the house where George died. It seems George’s hooker was close friends with the murdered prostitute. In attempting to track down Alexandra’s husband to question him about the murder, Matt winds up on the yacht with the sunbathing ladies. Megan is instantly smitten with the handsome detective, and it seems the attraction is mutual. As Megan’s relationship with Matt progresses, her naughty gigolo pact with her friends and Matt’s murder investigation intertwine. This juicy tale moves at breakneck speed, making for an exciting read. At times, however, this rushing speed results in underdeveloped story elements, such as a dog that suddenly shows up in Megan’s life and then plays a crucial role in the plot. But this is a minor issue that takes little away from what is overall a terrific novel. Because Firmin gives equal time to her female and male characters, the book should be equally appealing both sexes—no small feat. A swiftly paced tale of lust, seduction, duplicity and horror, Firmin’s debut easily keeps the pages turning.
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-1462042388
Page Count: 293
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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