A compelling mystery anchored by a winningly roguish hero.
A musician with investigative chops connects a missing man with a money scam in Breen’s mystery novel.
In the author’s second installment in the Seamus O’Neill Mystery series, Seamus’ boss at the Ryder Detective Agency, John Ryder, knows his new part-time employee is in the office because it “smells like a distillery.” Thirty-three-year-old Seamus, a barfly and Midwestern rock musician of dwindling reputation by the 1990s, explains that his background in music helps him realize when something he is investigating is out of alignment: “There are keys and chord progressions, and, when something doesn’t work, you sense it more than see it.” He’s all ears when Mary Hoffman, one of his former lovers, asks Ryder to investigate what her younger brother Tom is up to. He’s withdrawn thousands of dollars from his account and has a shoe box full of fake documents; oddly, he also has a sudden interest in Shakespeare. Shortly after Mary contacts the detective agency, Kathy Siler hires Ryder for help in finding her missing father, multimillionaire Bertram Newman, who, like Tom, suddenly became keen on the Bard. Beautiful—and towering at well over 6 feet tall—police detective Erin Meyer and Seamus consider multiple suspects in Bertram’s disappearance, including other local Shakespeare aficionados, such as Tom’s roommate, who knew Newman. The book has an easy pace, believable dialogue, and scenes that string together cohesively. But the author tends to go too much into the weeds; a section on the numerous times one of Seamus’ fellow musicians was shot does not move the story along, and the name-checking of brand-name drinks falls flat. References to the previous book in the series are unobtrusive, and it’s engaging to see Seamus evolve from a dive-bar musician hitting on multiple young women to a thoughtful investigator crushing on Erin because of her desire to help people (but her long legs are worth a look).
A compelling mystery anchored by a winningly roguish hero.Pub Date: July 6, 2023
ISBN: 9798986208336
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Dutch Hollow Press
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
Fascinating main characters and a clever plot add up to an exciting read.
A thriller with bloody murders and plenty of suspects and featuring an unlikely partnership between two FBI investigators.
FBI consultant Amos Decker has a lot on his mind. The huge fellow once played for the Cleveland Browns in the NFL until he received a catastrophic brain injury, leaving him with synesthesia; he sees death as electric blue. More pertinent to the plot, he also has hyperthymesia, or spontaneous and highly accurate recall. On the one hand, his memories can be horrible. He’d once come home to find his wife and daughter murdered, dead in pools of blood. Later, he listens helplessly on the telephone while his ex-partner shoots herself in the mouth. On the other hand, his memory helps him solve every case he's given. Now he's sent to Florida with a brand-new partner, Special Agent Frederica White, to investigate the murder of a federal judge. Both partners are pissed at their last-minute pairing, and they immediately see themselves as a bad fit. White is a diminutive Black single mother of two who has a double black belt in karate “because I hate getting my ass kicked.” (The author doesn't mention Decker's race, but since he's being contrasted with his new partner in every way, perhaps readers are expected to see him as White. Clarity would be nice.) Their case is strange: Judge Julia Cummins was stabbed 10 times and her face covered with a mask, while her bodyguard was shot to death. Decker and White puzzle over the “very contrarian crime scene” where two murders seem to have been committed by two different people in the same place. The plot gets complex, with suspects galore. But the interpersonal dynamic between Decker and White is just as interesting as the solution to the murders, which doesn't come easily. At first, they’d like to be done with each other and go their separate ways. But as they work together, their mutual respect rises and—alas—the tension between them fades almost completely. The pair will make a great series duo, especially if a bit of that initial tension between them returns. And Baldacci shouldn’t give Decker a pass on his tortured memories, because readers enjoy suffering heroes. It's not enough that his near-perfect recall helps him in his job.
Fascinating main characters and a clever plot add up to an exciting read.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1982-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
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