Hard-case crimes with the bonus of a few surprising zingers.
Hard Case Crime completes its cycle of Collins’ novels about not-quite-reformed thief Nolan with his first appearance and one of his last.
In Spree, the later, longer, and more polished of the pair, Nolan’s live-in lover, Sherry, is kidnapped to pressure him into masterminding a grandly scaled robbery of the most tempting targets among the 50 stores in Missouri’s Brady Eighty mall. Coleman Comfort, the paterfamilias behind the scheme, already has a grudge against Nolan for killing his brother Sam and Sam’s two sons in an earlier plot that went violently off the rails, and it seems obvious that as soon as the heist is history, he plans to kill Sherry and Nolan anyway. In fact, his homicidal plans are even more extensive than that, though not if Nolan and his frequent accomplice Jon Ross have anything to say about it. Mourn the Living, the first story Collins wrote about Nolan, though not the first he published, is an informal homage to Richard Stark’s adventures of one-named criminal Parker. Owing a big favor to mobbed-up pencil pusher Sid Tisor, Nolan reluctantly agrees to look into the death of Tisor’s daughter, Irene, a Chelsey University student who fell 10 stories to her death, even though it’s going to bring him uncomfortably close to Chicago’s Franco crime family, who’ve already put a $250,000 bounty on his head for his past misdeeds against them. Was Irene high on LSD? Was she actually pushed? What details have been covered up by Chelsey cop Phil Saunders, who’s the cousin of incompetent gang boss George Franco’s financial secretary Irwin Elliot, the real power behind Chelsey’s thriving drug industry?
Hard-case crimes with the bonus of a few surprising zingers.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781789091465
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.
On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family.
When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family, hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed.
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593875551
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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