The third installment of DePoy’s franchise, which finds a compelling anchor in its sleuth, crackles with energy and a plot...
A tough Child Protective Services officer tangles with all kinds of miscreants in his efforts to help a pair of Seminole waifs.
Florida, 1976. CPS bulldog Foggy Moscowitz (Three Shot Burst, 2017, etc.) tells the reader right up front that Sammy “Icepick” Franks has dragged a body out of the trunk of his Lincoln and tossed it in the bay. He also shoots a barking dog, which is where Foggy comes in. The crime(s) are witnessed by Little Cloud and Wonder Girl, a pair of Seminole children whose mother, Echu Matta, has gone missing. A cleaning woman at the Benton Inn, she hasn’t come home for three nights. Battling racism from both the locals and law enforcement fills Foggy with a brittle righteousness that imbues his punchy first-person narrative. Along with Sharp and Duck, two hotheaded Native Americans, he resolves to ferret out the truth. The officious manager of the Benton offers the implausible story that a disgruntled Matta and two co-workers simply haven’t been showing up to work in protest over their discriminatory treatment. Foggy is devastated when the dead body in the bay turns out to be that of Pan Pan Washington, his old pal from Brooklyn. Not coincidentally, Foggy and Pan Pan tangled with Icepick in Brooklyn way back when. The corpses pile up as Foggy, Sharp, and Duck head to Oklahoma to untangle the twisted conspiracy behind the killings and find the missing mom.
The third installment of DePoy’s franchise, which finds a compelling anchor in its sleuth, crackles with energy and a plot as twisty as a country road.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8795-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
As tangled and turbulent as the hero’s nightmares, and that’s saying quite a bit.
Having survived his tempestuous debut, P.T. Marsh, of Georgia's Mason Falls Police Department, is back for more—including some residue from that first case that just won’t go away.
Dispatched like an errand boy to wealthy real estate mogul Ennis Fultz’s home to find out why he hasn’t joined his bridge buddies, Mayor Stems and interim police chief Jeff Pernacek, for their monthly game, Marsh and his partner, Remy Morgan, find Fultz dead in his bed. It turns out that his passing, devoutly longed for by so many of the people he’d crushed or outwitted on his way to the top, was helped along by the strategic dose of nitrogen somebody substituted for the oxygen he inhaled regularly, especially when he was expecting particular demands on his virility. Marsh and Morgan quickly focus on two candidates who might have made those demands: Suzy Kang, a recent visitor who was so eager to cover any traces that she’d been to Fultz’s house that she sold the car she’d driven there, and Connie Fultz, the victim’s ex-wife and perhaps his current lover, who acidly swats them away and tells them: “Look for some little gal who’s into bondage.” McMahon excels in sweating the procedural details of the investigation, which take the partners from a search for Suzy Kang and that missing car to a not-so-accidental car crash that’s evidently targeted a young girl who has no idea she’s implicated in the case. But he’s set his sights higher, taking in everything from a civil suit the relatives of the perp Marsh shot in The Good Detective (2019) have launched against him to a possible conspiracy behind the deaths of his deeply grieved wife and son, all of it larded with Georgia attitude and truisms, a few of which rise to eloquence (“I wasn’t good at faith. I was good at proof”).
As tangled and turbulent as the hero’s nightmares, and that’s saying quite a bit.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53556-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Schneider’s debut enlivens the police procedural with offbeat characters and an appealingly complex hero.
Hollywood detectives catch the strange case of a brutally burned body.
Detective Tully Jarsdel is a former academic, leading his partner, Morales, to call him Professor. When he fights his way through multiple news crews to reach a corpse one day, it's unlike any he’s ever seen. The body is twisted, partially ravaged, and burned so badly it’s unrecognizable. Jarsdel and Morales intensely question Dustin Sparks, the horror-movie special-effects expert who found the body. He eventually admits that he saw the body being dumped from a van, but his addiction to OxyContin makes him a compromised witness. While waiting for DNA results, Jarsdel and Morales watch missing persons reports closely. An odd red disk glued to the victim’s palm turns out to be a 1996 quarter painted red: the case’s first clue, albeit a murky one. DNA connects the victim to grizzled convict Lawrence Wolin, who identifies the man as his brother. The pieces of Grant Wolin’s life come together via interviews prompted by a search of his dirty apartment. He sold jars of “genuine Hollywood dirt” on the street, smoked marijuana occasionally, and was apparently asexual. A dinner scene at the home of Jarsdel’s scholarly parents provides insight into his psyche and his sense of isolation. Though he fits in with neither the gritty world of police work nor the ivory tower of academia, he has a passion for justice.
Schneider’s debut enlivens the police procedural with offbeat characters and an appealingly complex hero.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4926-8444-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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