Worth staying with for its sense of Brooklyn neighborhoods and its shocking conclusion as long as you don’t mind the...
Eighteen months after the Twin Towers fall, Russian-born Artie Cohen, back in the NYPD fold again (Bloody London, 1999, etc.), finds a new hell in Brooklyn.
Even though Artie’s never been close to his cousin Evgenia or her husband, Sheepshead Bay restaurateur Johnny Farone, he’s always had a special bond with their son Billy, the godson he loves to take fishing. Weeks before the boy is about to turn 12, he disappears just as jogger Ivana Galitzine makes a chilling discovery: a half-buried pile of bloodstained children’s clothes, including a red shirt Billy had been given by his friend May Luca, 10, and also missing. Artie’s boss Sonny Lippert, who heads a special police unit investigating crimes against children, is sure that a serial killer who’s already struck twice in Brooklyn is to blame. But Artie’s not sure of anything, not even whether the clothing came from Billy or May. Unfortunately, his road to enlightenment is dragged out by Nadelson’s sluggish pacing. When even the most promisingly scruffy new arrivals need to say everything three times, as if they were all on bad cell phone lines, it’s no wonder that Artie doesn’t realize “my relationship with Billy validated me as a human being” till page 234. Catching the killer will take even longer.
Worth staying with for its sense of Brooklyn neighborhoods and its shocking conclusion as long as you don’t mind the pervasive moroseness. Even the sex is glum.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8027-3383-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
Looks like Neal Carey, the peripatetic agent of that free- lance justice troop Friends of the Family, will never get back to New York to write his dissertation on Tobias Smollett. This time he's sprung from three years in a Chinese monastery (The Trail to Buddha's Mirror, 1992) only to be sent undercover as a ranch-hand in the Nevada plains to scout out the Sons of Seth, a white- supremacist flock that's his best hope for locating two-year-old Cody McCall, snatched from his Hollywood mother during a paternal weekend. Neal settles in deep, of course, and his ritual ordeals- -having to sell out the rancher who took him in, breaking off his romance with tough schoolmarm Karen Hawley, going up against rotten-apple Cal Strekker, getting ordered to kill his Friendly mentor Joe Graham—are as predictable as the trademark dose of mysticism as the bodies pile up, and as the certainty that when the dust settles, Neal won't be back at school. Winslow's Aryan crazies don't have the threatening solidity of Stephen Greenleaf's (Southern Cross, p. 1102 ), but Neal's latest adventure is full of entertaining derring-do.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09934-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
Three quick, enjoyable reads to get you in a murderous Christmas spirit.
Three familiar sleuths each get a turn in this trio of cozy Christmas mysteries.
First, O’Connor (Murder in Galway, 2019, etc.) dives into Siobhán O’Sullivan’s past. Just graduated from the Garda College and not due to report for duty until the New Year, she’s busy preparing for Christmas when she sees a sign advertising a missing dog and links the disappearance to that of her own family dog and others around town. When the town Santy, Paddy O’Shea, is discovered floating dead in a dunk tank he’s filled with hot chocolate, all the missing dogs are also found, waiting in vain to be part of his extravagant show. Now Siobhán must help catch Santy's killer. Next up, Day (Strangled Eggs and Ham, 2019, etc.) presents South Lick, Indiana, cafe/country store owner Robbie Jordan, whose boyfriend Abe’s father, Howard O’Neill, has secretly acquired Cocoa, a rescued Lab puppy, as a Christmas gift for Abe’s son, Sean. When Howard’s business associate, Jed Greenberg, is found dead on an icy sidewalk, tangled in Cocoa’s leash, it turns out to be murder. Though Jed had plenty of enemies, Howard is a particularly choice suspect because he’d just learned that Jed had cheated him in a business deal. In the final tale, Erickson (Death by Café Mocha, 2019, etc.) features cafe/bookstore owner Krissy Hancock, a locally renowned sleuth who reluctantly accompanies her friend Rita Jablonski to a remote warehouse, where Lewis Coates, whose attention to detail is obsessive, has installed an escape room. Each member of the small group is given their own room whose door code they must determine from cryptic clues. They all manage to escape to a large locked room where they find the corpse of Coates. A prick Krissy finds on his finger and traces to a trick mug strongly suggests that one of the players is also a killer.
Three quick, enjoyable reads to get you in a murderous Christmas spirit.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2360-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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