A feverish story that effectively turns neo-noir conventions on its head.
In Litchfield’s 1950s-set thriller, a Chicago fixer nearly meets his match during a hunt for a rare necklace.
Trouble is never far away for Ray Stokes, a veteran problem-solver whose leisure activities revolve around stiff drinks and attractive but inscrutable women. However, Ray’s boss, Walter Cartwell, isn’t one to let his top performer lie fallow. He’s fixated on a rare piece of jewelry—a rare necklace, found long ago by Jamaican marine explorer Herman Hessman, which later disappeared from a museum; Walter believes that a church secretary in Boston named Merriam Woodcroft has it, and he hires Ray in a frenzied quest to obtain it, so that he can verify its authenticity. At first, Ray wants no part of the assignment, which seems too pedestrian for his hedonistic mindset. But Cartwell has other ideas, and his iron will prevails (“Let Walter down at your peril; he wasn't the forgiving type”). The trip leads Ray to Arnold Sinclair, a philandering pastor who may be dealing in more than mere donations. Complications don’t take long to ensue, especially after Ray wins the confidence of Arnold’s bedmate, Merriam. It’s the type of premise that will sound very familiar to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler aficionados, which is a feature, not a bug. Litchfield knows this territory well, dishing out suitably snarky asides on human nature: “She was a job, nothing more.” In keeping with that brief, the prose style is lean, but with all the zingers that the genre demands—whether it’s local riffraff eyeing Ray’s car “like fireflies to a porch light” or a compliment that hits Merriam “like a bumper car.” Every detail seems relevant, and not a syllable seems wasted—a tough trick to pull off. It all results in an appealing tale that also upends stereotypical impressions of ’50s Americana.
A feverish story that effectively turns neo-noir conventions on its head.Pub Date: June 30, 2025
ISBN: 9781732332850
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Lowestoft Chronicle Press
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.
The feds must protect an accused criminal and an orphaned girl.
Maybe you’ve met him before as protagonist of The 6:20 Man (2022): Ex-Army Ranger Travis Devine, who’d had the dubious fortune to tangle with “the girl on the train,” is now assigned by his homeland security boss to protect Danny Glass, who's awaiting trial on multiple RICO charges in Washington state. Devine has what it takes: He “was a closer, snooper, fixer, investigator,” and, when necessary, a killer. These skills are on full display as the deaths of three key witnesses grind justice to a temporary halt. Glass has a 12-year-old niece, Betsy Odom, and each is the other’s only living relative—her parents recently died of an apparent drug overdose. The FBI has temporary guardianship of Betsy, who's a handful. She tells Travis that though she’s not yet 13, she's 28 in “life-shit years.” The financially well-heeled Glass wants to be her legal guardian with an eye to eventual adoption, but what are his real motives? And what happens to her if he's convicted? Meanwhile, Betsy insists that her parents never touched drugs, and she begs Travis to find out how they really died. This becomes part of a mission that oozes danger. The small town of Ricketts has a woman mayor who’s full of charm on the surface, but deeply corrupt and deadly when crossed. She may be linked to a subversive group called "12/24/65," as in 1865, when the Ku Klux Klan beast was born. Blood flows, bombs explode, and people perish, both good guys and not-so-good guys. Readers might ponder why in fiction as well as in life, it sometimes seems necessary for many to die so one may live. And what about the girl on the train? She's not necessary to the plot, but she's a fun addition as she pops in and out of the pages, occasionally leaving notes for Travis. Maybe she still wants him dead.
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781538757901
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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