A welcome return for Brendy McCusker, the rent-a-cop who used to work for the Ulster Constabulary, and DI Lily O’Carroll, who still does.
Louis Bloom went to take out a bag of trash five minutes before the 9 PM television screening of The Fall and never returned. Normally his disappearance wouldn’t be investigated for two days, but his wife, Elizabeth, is the sister of Angela Larkin, whose husband is Superintendent Niall Larkin of the Ulster Royal Constabulary—or the Police Service of Northern Ireland, as it’s now called. So Lily and McCusker both get rousted from their beds in the dead of night to question the newly distressed wife and begin preliminary investigations. These quickly lead to a simple explanation of why Louis Bloom never came home: He’s lying stabbed to death in the nearby Friar’s Bush graveyard. Who would have wanted to kill an inoffensive lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast whose specialization was “The Politics of Love”? Maybe Al Armstrong, the platonic but exceedingly close friend Elizabeth asks to come over even before Lily and McCusker arrive. Maybe Bloom’s own friend Mariana Fitzgerald, a former escort who proves, along with her friend Murcia Woyda, that marrying one of your wealthy clients and retiring from the escort game is no guarantee of happily ever after. Maybe his administrative assistant, the whimsically named Leab David, who’s clearly having an affair with another of his colleagues at QUB. In the end, though, whodunit matters less than the many individual scenes Charles (One of Our Jeans Is Missing, 2016, etc.) crafts with such a careful eye on the sparks that can fly—some of them charming, some witty, some downright menacing—between characters who don’t happen to see eye to eye, or sometimes even to be operating in the same galaxy.
Once again, it’s hard to resist a hero who realizes, “He just had a habit of opening his mouth and not knowing what was going to come out.”Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8023-1362-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dufour
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | POLICE PROCEDURALS
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After a flight in fantasy with When the Wind Blows (1998), Patterson goes to ground with another slash-and-squirm psychokiller page-turner, this one dedicated to “the millions of Alex Cross readers, who so frequently ask, can’t you write faster?” By day, Geoffrey Shafer is a charming, 42-year-old British Embassy paper-pusher with a picture-perfect family and a shady past as an MI-6 secret agent. Come sundown, he swallows a pharmacy of psychoactive pills, gulps three black coffees loaded with sugar, and roams the streets of Washington, D.C., in a battered cab, where, disguised as a black man, he rolls dice to determine which among his black female fares he—ll murder. Afterwards he dumps his naked victims in crime-infested back alleys of black- slum neighborhoods, then sends e-mails boasting of his accomplishments to three other former MI-6 agents involved in a hellish Internet role-playing game. “I sensed I was at the start of another homicide mess,” sighs forensic-psychologist turned homicide-detective Alex Cross. Cross yearns to catch the “Jane Doe murderer” but is thwarted by Det. Chief George Pittman, who assigns sexy Det. Patsy Hampton to investigate Cross and come up with a reason for dismissing him. Meanwhile, Cross’s fiancÇe is kidnaped during a Bermuda vacation, and an anonymous e-mail warns him to back off. He doesn’t, of course, and just when it appears that Patterson is sleep-walking through his story, Cross nabs Shafer minutes after Shafer kills Det. Hampton. During the subsequent high-visibility trail, Shafer manages to make the jury believe that he’s innocent and that Cross was trying to frame him. When all seems lost, a sympathetic British intelligence chief offers to help Cross bring down Shafer, and the other homicidal game-players, during a showdown on the breezy beaches of Jamaica. Kinky mayhem, a cartoonish villain, regular glimpses of the kindly Cross caring for his loved ones, and an ending that spells a sequel: Patterson’s fans couldn’t ask for more.
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-69328-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | POLICE PROCEDURALS | THRILLER
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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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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