A thoughtful but unevenly executed whodunit.
In Paton’s philosophical mystery series installment,two cops diligently work to solve the murder of a man found in a dumpster.
Detective Erik Jansson of the Greater Metro Investigative Unit in St. Paul, Minnesota,finds himself mesmerized by the murder victim, who readers later learn is an ex-cop named Dan Routh, as if “this was personal not just to the victim, but to Erik himself. A premonition that despite serving the greater good, his ultimate fate could be mean and lowly, his existence soon forgotten.” Erik’s work partner, Deb Metzger, is equally intrigued by the mystery. She, like Routh, has been working to break up human-trafficking rings, and she and Erik interview a plethora of intriguing characters in their investigation—including young women who Deb worries might be at risk of being trafficked themselves. Opioid abuse abounds, and various people whom Erik and Deb meet struggle to stay clean, including Jalyn Dudek, a young pianist whose ex-boyfriend Joseph “Josh” Miller hovers on the edge of a relapse. As the case intensifies, nearly all the characters face further danger. This is an ambitious mystery that tackles heavy themes, such as the darkness of addiction and the fragility of human existence. Paton adroitly crafts engaging sentences that immediately hook the reader’s attention, such as “They lie when they say there’s a clean death” and “Erik saw his own death. Scratches gouged from eyes to chin, shirt ripped open, baring his chest, teeth clamped. All self-inflicted.” However, the novel’s large cast makes keeping track of everyone’s relationship to one another a tricky task. As Paton herself writes, in another context: “Keeping everybody straight—Retta, Ramon, Gran, Aunt Lyndsay, Gabe—had become Jaylyn’s full-time job.” Although this clutter of characters, in some ways, fits the hard-boiled detective plot, it also slows the pace and makes it overly difficult to discern which details are important and which are superfluous.
A thoughtful but unevenly executed whodunit.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-60381-768-4
Page Count: 223
Publisher: Epicenter Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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