Pecora is no Raymond Chandler and Cody Thomas is no Philip Marlowe, but this debut detective novel bodes well for Pecora’s...
In this mystery novel, Cody Thomas, private eye, tries to find the real murderer and clear his accused wife, with not a moment to lose.
Pecora, a first-time mystery writer, contrives an effective noir scene to open his story of death and deception. Cody, ex-cop and now private detective, has bugged an adjoining room in a sleazy hotel and is listening in the dark, in the small hours. The sounds—giggling, bed creaking, passionate moaning—indicate an assignation. Then he hears drunken snoring and gets just a glimpse of a young woman walking away down the corridor. No big deal, until the creep, Samuel Hollowell, is found dead the next morning, tied naked to the bed. Cody turns the tape over to his old partner, Lt. Andy Perone, whom he knows to be honest and who happens to be heading up the investigation. The hunt is on—and, it seems, soon over: Cody’s wife, Joanna, confesses to him that she was the mystery woman at the hotel. Now, as the bodies pile up—someone is knocking off those who might spell trouble—Cody has to solve the case to clear his stir-crazy wife amid well-founded marital insecurity. The well-handled tension serves as the narrative’s strongest dynamic, even though Joanna’s reason for being in the hotel room seems rather forced. When Cody and his lawyer manage to get Joanna released on bond, there’s another killing, and Joanna gets hauled back in. Perhaps Joanna is innocent after all, but then who’s the real killer? Pecora admirably weaves the twisty plot that’s as much about Cody’s overwhelming doubt—of his wife’s fidelity, of a police department that he knows is corruptible—as it is about simply solving the murders. Description and dialogue are often overwrought or stiff, though, but the conclusion is well-handled.
Pecora is no Raymond Chandler and Cody Thomas is no Philip Marlowe, but this debut detective novel bodes well for Pecora’s future.Pub Date: June 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1466944268
Page Count: 284
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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