A full-throated exposé with perhaps too many enforcers and avengers for comfort.
Detective Superintendent Roy Grace’s 15th outing focuses on the dark side of internet dating, which is darker than you can imagine.
Dieter Haas, Munich divorcée Lena Welch’s online beau; Richie Griffiths, widowed Lynda Merrill’s digital suitor; Norbert Petersen, Suzy Driver’s dishy crush; and Evelyne Desota, retired NYPD detective Matthew Sorokin’s would-be mate, all have two things in common. They’ve extracted thousands from the lovers who’ve never met them, and they don’t exist. The scam romances have been expertly coordinated by Jules de Copeland, ne Tunde Oganjimi, and his cousin Kofi Okonjo, aka Dunstan Ogwang, a pair of Ghanaians convinced that their actions are morally justified by the West’s centuries of imperialism and alarmingly willing to cover their tracks by whatever violent means necessary. Even though most of their victims are left too shocked, too ashamed, or too dead to say anything, Grace and the Surrey and Sussex Major Crime Team soon get on the scamsters’ trails. So do Jack Roberts, owner/operator of Global Investigations; Matthew Sorokin, who doesn’t take his humiliating swindle lying down; and Tooth, a hired killer who’s already racked up a history with the Major Crime Team. As Jules de Copeland closes in on Lynda Merrill and the 450,000 pounds she’s promised Richie Griffiths, Roberts, Sorokin, and Tooth, working very much at odds with each other, all compete with the police for the prize of grabbing and neutralizing him without endangering his woefully credulous target. It’s no wonder that the fade-out finds Grace (Dead If You Don’t, 2018, etc.) contemplating pastures new that promise big changes in the next installment.
A full-throated exposé with perhaps too many enforcers and avengers for comfort.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5098-1639-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
The perfect bonbon to pick up for distraction during those long production numbers at the actual Oscars.
Think the competition among Oscar nominees is a blood sport? You have no idea.
Desperation at Dawn has snared Academy Award nominations for writer/director Peter Barrington; his wife, composer Hattie Barrington; lead actress Tessa Tweed; supporting actor Mark Weldon; and Tessa’s husband, Ben Bacchetti, who, as head of Centurion Studios, would bask in the award for best picture. Tessa’s nomination is nice for her, but it grates on Viveca Rothschild, the blonde bombshell who, determined that her own third nomination will be the charm, resolves to do whatever it takes to undermine Tessa, beginning with getting hired on Trial by Fire, Tessa’s aptly named new film, and planting snippy items about her in gossip columns. But that’s far from the biggest problem lurking beneath the tinsel. Viveca’s boyfriend, Iraq War vet Bruce, has PTSD and a much less nuanced approach than his girlfriend to stopping Tessa in her tracks. Even worse, crime boss Gino Patelli, suspecting that his uncle and predecessor, Carlo Gigante, was offed by Centurion producer Billy Barnett, hires a series of variously hapless underlings to find and kill him. As Billy tells his attorney, Peter’s father Stone Barrington, when he’s arrested for a rare murder he didn’t commit, “It seems to be open season on Billy Barnett.” But the predators’ job is considerably complicated by the fact that Billy, like Mark Weldon, is an alter ego of former CIA operative Teddy Fay, who effortlessly spots every Patelli employee early on, switches identities in a flash to escape them, and shoots them when he can’t. So the suspense in this enjoyably weightless tale is focused on the climactic Academy Award ceremonies. Who wants to bet that Tessa or Teddy will get killed or that Desperation at Dawn won’t sweep the categories in which it’s nominated?
The perfect bonbon to pick up for distraction during those long production numbers at the actual Oscars.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-08325-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A high-country Presumed Innocent that moves like greased lightning. First of a welcome new series, though it’s hard to...
Rookie Twelve Sleep County Game Warden Joe Pickett’s not much of a shot, and he’s been looking like a goat ever since poacher Ote Keeley got the drop on him with his own gun during a routine arrest. But at least he’s doing better than Ote, who’s turned up dead on the woodpile outside Joe’s house. Joe’s search in Crazy Woman Creek canyon for the two outfitters and guides Ote was most recently partnered with ends happily, though violently, and suddenly Joe is the man of the hour. Longtime County Sheriff Bud Barnum nervously asks Joe’s assurance that he’s not going to support neighboring game warden Wacey Hedeman’s challenge in the upcoming election; trophy wife Aimee Kensinger, who really likes men in uniforms, invites Joe’s family to housesit her palatial digs for three weeks; and wily Vern Dunnegan, Joe’s predecessor, wants Joe to join him in pulling down big bucks from InterWest resources, the fat-cat corporation for whose gas pipeline Vern’s lining up local support. All this good news is only a front, of course, for a monstrous assault on Joe’s livelihood, his integrity, and his family—and incidentally on an inoffensive species long assumed extinct. In response, Joe promises one of the bad guys that “things are going to get real western,” and that’s exactly what happens in the satisfyingly action-filled climax.
A high-country Presumed Innocent that moves like greased lightning. First of a welcome new series, though it’s hard to imagine tourism-marketing exec Box topping his debut.Pub Date: July 9, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14748-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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