A fun escapist read with engaging characters and intriguing historical morsels; a solid series addition.
A ghost haunts the woods outside Lemont, Illinois, in this third installment of a mystery series.
Billy Nokoy, a 20-something Native American, knows he is considered a loser, but now he also thinks he must be going crazy. He seems to have the power to cause lightning bolt–style destruction. There is only one person who might be able to help him understand what happened at Mount Forest Island—Cora Tozzi. Grandmotherly Cora was there the day Billy’s mysterious force was released. Meanwhile, Valerie Pawlik, who was permanently blinded in an automobile accident two years ago, also faces a crossroads. She has mastered navigating without her eyesight, but her brother and sister-in-law want her to move out of their home. Divorced, without a job, the mother of an 11-year-old daughter living in California, and just about out of savings, Valerie is stuck in place. According to her psychological counselor, Father McGrath, she needs to make friends, never her strong suit, and to confront her unresolved emotional baggage—her mother abandoned the family when Valerie was 13 and she never saw her again. Father McGrath recommends she seek help from Cora, with whom she had a bitter fight just before her car crash. Everything is in place for Camalliere’s special sauce, a mixture of present-day drama, history, and unexplained phenomena—plus, of course, a ghost, in this case one who is a bit confused but determined to exact revenge. From the 1920s until the early ’40s, Mount Forest Island was home to a golf course and clubhouse used by Al Capone and his friends as well as a farmhouse with mob connections. The structures were torn down decades ago, but left behind, apparently, was some unfinished personal business. Billy’s and Valerie’s quests begin to converge when he becomes the reluctant mystical conduit between past and present. He alone sees the once-abandoned, now nonexistent structures, and only he interacts with the very talkative spirit. The author supplements genealogical research and supernatural meddling with satisfying, well-paced action scenes.
A fun escapist read with engaging characters and intriguing historical morsels; a solid series addition.Pub Date: March 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-937484-72-9
Page Count: 359
Publisher: Amika Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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