An engaging whodunit with a hero with a sharp tongue and a sharper mind.
“Big-time college sports is a cesspool,” according to New York City private investigator Elgin O’Brien—but he still decides to wade into it on behalf of a grieving father in O’Connor and Stout’s mystery novel.
When the homicide of college basketball player Teddy Malone lands on his desk, Elgin—a former professional b-ball player-turned-PI—is keen to prove that there was a motive behind the seemingly random shooting. There are no suspects in the murder, which occurred in midtown Manhattan, and Elgin soon uncovers that Teddy wasn’t the happy-go-lucky rising star that some claimed. His skills had been going downhill, despite what his head coach, Chris Corsito, says; the coach, whom Elgin, knows, considers himself a god at St. Stephen’s University—one too powerful to topple. After Elgin discovers that Teddy had a gambling addiction, it raises concerns about possible debts or game-fixing—which are only compounded when fentanyl is discovered in his bedroom. The case takes another turn when Elgin conducts interviews at a basketball camp and deems someone there to be a suspect—but there’s no obvious evidence, beyond the person’s guilty behavior. However, as Elgin gets closer to the truth, he’s offered a bribe to forget the whole thing, and Elgin’s girlfriend, actress Monique Montgomery, faces danger, as well. Despite all this, the PI continues to gather evidence and uncovers that some other people may have helped to enable terrible crimes. Elgin’s efforts lead to revelations of a very disturbing nature.
Although the book is set in the present day, the style and tropes of the story vividly recall the fast-paced adventures of decades-old detective stories. Elgin is sharp as a tack, although he’s sometimes cagy about it, and he has a dark past of his own that fuels his drive to discover the truth at all costs. Much of the investigation consists of interviews, and the quip-filled dialogue gives life to the story, and to Elgin as a character. Lines such as “I’ll find the shooter…but I’m not an executioner. I don’t deal in revenge” plunge the reader into the sometimes-melodramatic world of a crime-ridden New York City. Large sections of uninterrupted and unattributed dialogue disrupt the pace at times, but for the most part, the Q&A’s remain entertaining, thanks to Elgin’s strong voice. Along the way, the protagonist attempts to grapple with the money-driven world of professional basketball: “It’s really about power protecting power,” he reluctantly concludes. It’s a hard-hitting message, and the vast conspiracy that drives the story is effectively horrific, even if it sometimes pushes the bounds of credulity; it seems unlikely that Elgin would happen upon a suspect and expose a massive secret so easily. He’s also personally threatened with violence before he seems to pose any real threat, and what Monique faces is not difficult to foresee. That said, readers will find it easy to immerse themselves in O’Connor and Stout’s fictional world, and they’ll judge Elgin to be a compelling guide.
An engaging whodunit with a hero with a sharp tongue and a sharper mind.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9781958861608
Page Count: 460
Publisher: The Sager Group LLC
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon.
Pynchon returns, this time with a wacky whodunit that spans two continents.
What’s a sub without cheese? That’s not to be taken literally, like so much of Pynchon. The sub in question is a German one plying, in an unlikely scenario, the depths of Lake Michigan. There, in Milwaukee, we find Hicks McTaggart, gumshoe, who “has been ankling around the Third Ward all day keeping an eye on a couple of tourists in Borsalinos and black camel hair overcoats from the home office at 22nd and Wabash down the Lake”—the Chicago mob, in other words, drawn to Milwaukee in the void created by the absence of one Bruno Airmont, “the Al Capone of Cheese in Exile,” having legged it with a trunkload of cash some years earlier. Where could Bruno be? And why are those Germans, in those prewar days of Depression and protonationalism, skulking about under the waves? McTaggart will soon find out, sort of, having already been exposed to plenty of chatter—for, “this being Wisconsin, where you find more varieties of social thought than Heinz has pickles, over the years German American politics has only kept growing into a game more and more complicated.” Complicated it is. Trying to keep tabs on the twists and turns of Pynchon’s plot is a fool’s errand, but suffice it to say that it involves bowling, Les Paul, organized crime, Count Basie, a Russian bike gang, Nazis, and, yes, cheese, as well as some lovely psychedelic moments, including one where “fascist daredevil aviators are playing poker with Yangtze Patrol veterans who believe all that airplanes are good for is to be shot down.” Pynchon did the private dick thing to better effect in Inherent Vice (2009), a superior yarn in nearly every respect, so this one earns only an average grade—but then, middling Pynchon is better than a whole lot of writers’ best.
A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781594206108
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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
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