by Mike Lawson ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 7, 2015
After DeMarco’s unwontedly personal stake in finding his father’s murderer (House Reckoning, 2014), it’s nice to see him go...
D.C. fixer Joe DeMarco, posted to the wilds of North Dakota, schemes to avenge the death of a young woman he was sent there to protect.
Maybe 50 people read Sarah Johnson’s blog posts ranting about the systematic low-level bribery of state lawmakers. But when Sarah begins linking the bribes to billionaire independent natural gas driller Leonard Curtis, he gets madder than hell and decides he doesn’t have to take it anymore. So he calls D&L Consulting, his longtime fixers-cum-bagmen in Bismarck, and asks partners Marjorie Dawkins and Bill Logan to quit threatening Sarah and shut her up for good, unaware that a potential rescuer is already on the way. Sarah’s grandfather Doug Thorpe, a Marine who saved John Mahoney’s life in Vietnam, reaches out to Mahoney, now minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, and Mahoney dispatches DeMarco, his own fixer-cum-bagman, to Bismarck to make sure nothing happens to Sarah. DeMarco’s way of dealing with the problem, trying to dig up politically connected people who’ll turn informant against Curtis, doesn’t pan out, and one night, DeMarco, instead of responding to Sarah’s phone summons, beds a local schoolteacher instead. The next day, Sarah’s dead, shot apparently by a burglar she interrupted but actually, as both DeMarco and the reader are quick to appreciate, by a hit man Marjorie and Bill have hired to kill her. Under pressure from both Mahoney and Thorpe, remorseful DeMarco, aided by the world’s most reluctant FBI agent, assures anyone who’ll listen, including Marjorie and Thorpe, that he’s going to nail their hides to the wall. And so he does, very entertainingly, though not quite in the way he expected.
After DeMarco’s unwontedly personal stake in finding his father’s murderer (House Reckoning, 2014), it’s nice to see him go up against some fixers as impersonal as him. Everything here, from the hard-case characters to the headlong pace, is professional-grade.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2360-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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