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
Yes, it’s formula. Yes, it’s not as gritty an exercise in swamp mayhem as Hiaasen, Buchanan, or Crews might turn in. But,...
“I started dreaming of getting rich, which, in Florida anyway, can lead to serious trouble”: another blockbuster in the making from Grisham (Rogue Lawyer, 2015, etc.), the ascended master of the legal procedural.
If justice is blind, it is also served, in theory, by incorruptible servants. Emphasize “in theory,” for as Grisham’s latest opens, judicial investigator Lacy Stoltz is confronted with the unpleasant possibility that a highly regarded judge may be on the take. The charge comes, discreetly, from a former lawyer–turned-jailbird-turned-lawyer again, who spins out a seemingly improbable tale of racketeering that weds the best elements of Gulf Coast society with the worst, from the brilliant legal minds of Tallahassee to some very unpleasant lads once styled as the Catfish Mafia, now reborn in an alt-version, the Coast Mafia. Lacy’s brief is to find out just how rotten the rotten judge is—and the answer is plenty. Naturally, this knowledge is not acquired without cost; the body count rises, bad things happen to good people, and for a time, at least, the villains get away with murder and more. Grisham has never been strong on characterization: Lacy, we learn, is content to be single, “to live alone, to sleep in the center of the bed, to clean up only after herself,” and so forth, but beyond that the reader doesn’t get much sense of what drives her to put herself in the way of flying bullets and sneering counsel: “His associate was Ian Archer, an unsmiling sort who refused to shake hands with anyone and reeked of surliness.” In laid-back Florida? Indeed, and in Grisham’s busy hands, a lot of players come and go, some fated to sleep with the manatees.
Yes, it’s formula. Yes, it’s not as gritty an exercise in swamp mayhem as Hiaasen, Buchanan, or Crews might turn in. But, like eating a junk burger, even though you probably shouldn’t, it’s plenty satisfying.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-54119-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
A smart, captivating novel about unraveling secrets.
Puzzle genius Mike Brink, invited to Tokyo to open a booby-trapped puzzle box containing imperial secrets, risks becoming its latest victim.
No run-of-the-mill puzzle expert, Brink can suss out seemingly impossible solutions with the savant syndrome and synesthesia he acquired as the result of a freakish head injury during high school. But his “nuclear brainpower” intensifies his need “to put [himself] in psychic danger to feel alive.” In Japan, he feels as alive as he ever will, knowing that all six puzzle masters who attempted to open the deviously designed Dragon Box died trying. Constructed in 1868, “a time of unimaginable upheaval in Japan,” it is equipped with such charming features as a guillotine to cut off a misplaced finger and a lethal aerosol spray containing arsenic. But Brink’s tense adventure, which culminates in a cave on the island of Kyushu, “where the sun disappeared,” only begins with his efforts to open the box. He is pursued by dark forces who are so desperate to keep him from its secrets—which are said to hold a key to the future of humanity—that they had his doctor-mentor in America murdered. At the center of the drama are two estranged sisters, one Brink’s ally and the other part of the opposing faction. In different ways, both women, descendants of a samurai family, are beholden to Jameson Sedge, a tech billionaire who set up Brink’s ex-girlfriend for murder in Trussoni’s previous novel, The Puzzle Master (2023). Though he died by suicide, his downloaded consciousness is “digitally alive.” The sequel takes a while to get going, but once its hero starts applying his special gifts, learning things he has kept secret from himself, the pages turn and the suspense kicks in.
A smart, captivating novel about unraveling secrets.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9780593595329
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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