This exceptionally violent, well-conceived series continues to explore the moral gray zone.
This ninth installment finds the series’ leads in a deep thicket of revenge after a simple scam goes wrong.
Philip and Carrie Benson, aka The Travelers, are longtime grifters currently living in a suburban home outside Denver, Colorado, with a hacker named Merlin Jimenez. Their latest scam is a website called Death Becomes You. People can pay $5,000 in bitcoin for the Bensons to whack someone—however, they don’t actually commit the murder. When a potential client asks for crime reporter Robin Simons to die in what seems like an overdose, the scammers become suspicious that the FBI has found them. Researching the client turns up Dr. John Pollock, a dentist in Cornwell, Indiana. The Travelers raise their fee to $12,000, which Pollock pays. They don’t know that Pollock uses his dental office to sell OxyContin pills provided by drug lord Dylan Anderson. Anderson, annoyed that Pollock would try to kill the reporter sniffing around their business on his own, plans to eliminate the Bensons. The hit man creates collateral damage before the Bensons take him down. Philip and Carrie then visit Cornwell to exact revenge and scoop up enough cash for their next vacation. King’s smoothly executed and addictive series returns, offering cinematic action and a high body count. This time, the plot twist involves a ring of sex traffickers. What begins as genuine concern for a teen named Gypsy escalates into war against a powerful thug and his crew. Dark humor prevails, as when the Travelers find the shabby apartment of their targets and Philip notes, “When they say crime doesn’t pay, they were talking about these two.” The violence is never glamorized (“He shifted his weight, heard the shot as he felt the bullet explode through his back into his gut”). The finale suggests the Travelers may have more vigilantism in their future.
This exceptionally violent, well-conceived series continues to explore the moral gray zone.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-952711-02-2
Page Count: 229
Publisher: Blurred Lines Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers will root for the doorman in this enjoyable yarn.
A Manhattan doorman faces unwanted excitement in this thriller by the author of Two Nights in Lisbon (2022).
Ex-Marine Chicky Diaz has been a doorman at the Bohemia Apartments for 28 years. He is “relentlessly upbeat,” never breaks rules, never bad-mouths anyone. Everyone trusts him. He unfailingly greets each resident by name as they come and go—“Welcome home Mr. Goff” and “Let me get that bag for you Mrs. Frumm”—and seems unbothered by the financial and social chasm separating them from him. Chicky idly muses that anyone could kill or be killed around there with no one knowing it was going to happen. Nice foreshadowing, that. A widower with two daughters in college, he faces a mountain of unpaid medical bills because of his late wife’s cancer, and he owes a ton of back rent. By stark contrast, the Bohemia’s residents are all filthy rich. The building is “littered with Picassos, Chagalls, Renoirs. It’s practically a museum.” Wealthiest among them are Emily and Whit Longworth, a billionaire couple due to his business selling high-tech body armor. Before meeting Whit, Emily once cried after accidentally wasting 90 cents for an unneeded onion. And then her great beauty and sexual talent lead to matrimony and a family. Wanting to be a good person, she volunteers at a food pantry and quickly learns that it’s not cool to show up for duty in a bleeping taxi. Not wanting to be a good person, Whit finds his eye wandering to hookers, and what he does with them is scary. The quiet hatred growing between Emily and Whit is key to the plot. Meanwhile, beyond the Bohemia, there is social unrest after multiple reports of cops or white-supremacist thugs killing innocent Black men. Will there be riots? More to the point, will they affect the Bohemia’s wealthy residents? For his part, Chicky bears no one any ill will. He neither carries a weapon nor cares to and would just as soon be a passive observer. But he suffers a beatdown from a gang member named El Puño (The Fist) and is advised to apologize to the thug for having given offense. This leads to the bad guys learning what wealth lies inside those apartments. A plan develops. Will bullets fly? Will blood flow? Is the pope Catholic? Social, racial, and political commentary add color to the profanity-peppered pages.
Readers will root for the doorman in this enjoyable yarn.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780374604790
Page Count: 400
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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