Ruhlman and Headen draft an outstanding crew of writers to chronicle the misery of folks who can’t get out of their own ways.
Fifteen new tales of murder and mayhem as diverse as the city that spawned them.
How could a city whose main waterway once burned for 20 minutes, with flames reaching as high as five stories, deny its flair for the dramatic? Ruhlman and Headen populate this volume with a host of colorful characters who’d rule the world if they didn’t trip over their own feet. Take Caro, the hero of Abby L. Vandiver’s “Sugar Daddy,” who tries to run some game but ends up a chump. Or Gwen and Ally, two girls from Settler’s Landing who have a sweet con going in ritzy Bratenahl until they don’t, in Paula McLain’s “Love Always.” Susan Petrone tells the tale of a sportswriter who gets the interview of a lifetime but fails spectacularly to capitalize on it in “The Silent Partner.” So does Calvin, journalist hero of Dana McSwain’s “Bus Stop,” who has the very specialized gift of speaking to young female murder victims years after their demises but can’t bring them justice. Perhaps the saddest tale here is Angela Crook’s “Bitter,” which describes how the need for revenge can blot out years of hard-earned success. On the flip side, years of profitable petty chiseling can so quickly turn on their heads in editor Headen’s “The Book of Numbers.” Roxanne, in editor Ruhlman’s “The Ultimate Cure,” doesn’t so much bring destruction upon herself as blunder into it—unlike rock star Anders in Daniel Stashower’s “Lenny, but Not Corky,” who can’t wait to discover disaster on his own doorstep.
Ruhlman and Headen draft an outstanding crew of writers to chronicle the misery of folks who can’t get out of their own ways.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781636140995
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.
A snap of the yo-yo string yanks Harry Bosch out of retirement yet again.
Los Angeles Councilman Jake Pearlman has resurrected the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit in order to reopen the case of his kid sister, Sarah, whose 1994 murder was instantly eclipsed in the press by the O.J. Simpson case when it broke a day later. Since not even a councilor can reconstitute a police unit for a single favored case, Det. Renée Ballard and her mostly volunteer (read: unpaid) crew are expected to reopen some other cold cases as well, giving Bosch a fresh opportunity to gather evidence against Finbar McShane, the crooked manager he’s convinced executed industrial contractor Stephen Gallagher, his wife, and their two children in 2013 and buried them in a single desert grave. The case has haunted Bosch more than any other he failed to close, and he’s fine to work the Pearlman homicide if it’ll give him another crack at McShane. As it turns out, the Pearlman case is considerably more interesting—partly because the break that leads the unit to a surprising new suspect turns out to be both fraught and misleading, partly because identifying the killer is only the beginning of Bosch’s problems. The windup of the Gallagher murders, a testament to sweating every detail and following every lead wherever it goes, is more heartfelt but less wily and dramatic. Fans of the aging detective who fear that he might be mellowing will be happy to hear that “putting him on a team did not make him a team player.”
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-48565-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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