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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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