A promising but relentlessly lascivious detective tale.
In Lubow’s novel set in the late 1980s, a dissatisfied advertising executive finds himself investigating a missing-person case.
Thirty-five-year-old Benjamin Franklin Green of Chicago ad agency Swift, Pope & Fielding has masterminded successful campaigns for such products as Granny Annie’s soup, packaged in jars (“one simple word in bold, tightly packed letters. UNCANNY”). But after accidentally falling through a paneled conference room wall during a meeting, an embarrassed Ben leaves the building, leaves the city, and hops a plane to Los Angeles. He decides to write a coffee-table book comparing advertising images to reality, and he visits an old colleague, Andrew Beale Cole, and his wife to tell them all about it. While Ben is there, the Coles receive a phone call from someone claiming to have kidnapped their 21-year-old daughter, Abby. Cole asks Ben to travel to Colorado, where Abby disappeared, and help a private investigator track his daughter down. He believes that “idea man” Ben will “find a new slant. A way to solve it.” Before long, the Chicagoan is entangled in an adventure involving falconry, a gun-wielding loner nicknamed Rambo, crossbow-carrying poachers, and a suspenseful trek through the Colorado wilderness. Amateur ad-exec detectives are certainly a rarity in the genre, and Lubow does a fine job of establishing Ben’s analytical mind and off-kilter perspective. It results in striking images, even of mundane actions: “She waved at him, not with the whole hand, just her fingers lined up like little people, all bending at the waist, up down, up down.” The mystery itself takes lively detours and has an unexpected resolution. However, the novel is dragged down by the fact that Ben is incapable of interacting with women without sleazily gauging their sexual attractiveness. The female characters feel underdeveloped, as well; one woman’s most distinctive feature is that she spends a good portion of the book “naked but for a knife belt,” and another key character is topless when Ben first sees her; he notes “how her bosom shook when she talked…and didn’t stop after she’d stopped, but kept on jiggling.”
A promising but relentlessly lascivious detective tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.
Lt. Eve Dallas is sucked into a murder that may well be overshadowed by another crime—and by the news that Roarke, her billionaire husband, is implicated in both felonies in an unexpected and troubling way.
Disturbed from her sleep, Aileen Carville arises to discover her wealthy husband, Nathan Barrister, coshed to death by a heavy amethyst from the collection of his late father, Zip Global founder Henry J. Barrister. His corpse is lying outside an open vault that everyone in the family insists they hadn’t known about until a couple of months ago, and it’s filled with priceless paintings and sculptures and jewels taken years ago from an A-list of museums, one of which—the Royal Suite, a legendary emerald setting—has evidently been stolen once again. The bombshell revelation that Henry must have commissioned the thefts himself leads to two questions—how did the thief who killed Nathan know about the vault and its contents, and what possessed Nathan’s wealthy father to steal and hide all these goodies in the first place?—that are much more interesting than whodunit, though only one of them will be satisfactorily answered. Another bombshell revelation follows: Roarke’s confession to Dallas that he stole the Royal Suite from London’s Tate Gallery when he was still a teenager, years before he turned away from a life of crime himself. Since Interpol is much more interested in the theft than the murder, there’s a real danger that they’ll decide Roarke was once again the thief. So, Dallas faces the double challenge of solving the crimes and keeping her beloved husband out of the frame.
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414526
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
