by Parker Bilal ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2016
This fifth case for Makana (The Burning Gates, 2015, etc.) again deftly wraps a whodunit around an eloquent,...
One missing student from South Sudan is a puzzle; a second South Sudanese student found decapitated points to something altogether more disturbing.
December 2005. The Hafiz family hires veteran Egyptian private investigator Makana to investigate the sudden disappearance of their son Mourad, a university student. Mourad has chosen to go into engineering rather than taking over the family’s once-renowned restaurant, The Verdi Gardens, now past its prime. Mrs. Hafiz admits to Makana that they see Mourad rarely, and none of the family has any idea where he could be. The unconventional Makana, who lives on a boat, has become a friend and mentor to Aziza, the teenage daughter of his landlady. As he and Aziza walk by the river, a fisherman comes ashore with a severed head he’s found. This discovery provides Makana the opportunity to question his friend Okasha, a police detective, about his own new case and hear Okasha’s concern for the loneliness of Makana, who’s still haunted by his wife’s death more than a decade ago. With no real leads, the investigation proceeds slowly, though Makana learns from Mourad’s roommate, Abdelhadi, that he kept late hours and was disdainful of religions. Makana finds himself drawn to the victim dredged from the river. He visits the coroner, Doctor Siham, who has concluded that the victim, who was tortured, was of Mundari ethnicity, just like Mourad—and indeed like Makana. Could the mysteries be related?
This fifth case for Makana (The Burning Gates, 2015, etc.) again deftly wraps a whodunit around an eloquent, character-driven look at recent history.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-327-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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by Karin Slaughter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 29, 2015
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
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Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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by Michael Connelly ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 26, 2012
The resulting tension lifts this sturdy but uninspired procedural above most of its competition, though nowhere close to the...
Harry Bosch (The Drop, 2011, etc.) returns to yet another cold case—one that was taken out of his hand 20 years ago when it was still red hot.
Assigned to an emergency rotation in South-Central LA during the Rodney King riots, Harry’s sent out to an alley off Crenshaw Boulevard, where National Guard troops have found a body. The victim turns out to be Copenhagen journalist Anneke Jespersen, executed by a bullet to the head. With the city in the throes of a violent crisis, there’s no time to work this case or any other, and the death gets tossed into the deep freeze till it’s defrosted 20 years later by the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit. Now, however, some remarkable developments are waiting to be discovered. The Beretta handgun used in the crime has been traced to long-imprisoned gangbanger Rufus Coleman, whose brief off-the-record statement allows Harry to link the gun to at least two other murders in the intervening years. If the search for information about the weapon, mostly carried out by Harry’s long-suffering partner David Chu, seems almost too easy, the questions that stymied Harry back in 1992—what brought a Danish reporter to America, to riot-torn LA and to the alley where she met her death, and why was she killed?—prove just as hard to answer, especially since Harry’s new boss, Lt. Cliff O’Toole, makes it clear that on the 20th anniversary of the LAPD’s darkest hour, he doesn’t want the only case from that sorry chapter cleared to be the one that involved a white woman. Harry naturally meets O’Toole’s opposition by raising the stakes.
The resulting tension lifts this sturdy but uninspired procedural above most of its competition, though nowhere close to the top of Connelly’s own storied output.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-06943-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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