by Richard V. Rupp ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 2015
Don’t be fooled by the white-collar title; there’s plenty of bullets, tension, and old-fashioned police work.
Feds working the murder of an IRS agent in California find ties to a much-feared local gang and a Mexican drug cartel in Rupp’s debut thriller.
The latest case for FBI Agent Dick Hartmann and San Francisco’s Violent Crime Squad (aka the Animals) is a killing at the IRS Service Center in Fresno. Edison Shaw’s death looks like a suicide, but a lack of gunshot residue has cops ruling it a murder. Dick’s team, including newest member and recent Quantico grad Coleen Ann Ryan, quickly finds a connection between the IRS Service Center and Fresno hoodlums known as the Bulldog Gang. It seems the gang used the center’s Spanish Language Unit to operate an identity theft scheme. Things only get more complicated—and dangerous—when two high-ranking Bulldog members flee to Mexico, where drug cartels have been expanding their empire with white-collar crime in the U.S. The book takes a Sherlock-ian angle: Dick, a fan of Holmes, jokingly calls Coleen Doctor Watson and belongs to a social group called the Mischievous Irregulars. But Rupp’s story is unmistakably a procedural: the Animals and other FBI agents make headway with grunt work like questioning people and handling surveillance. There’s even some action, especially when the Bulldog Gang targets the Feds, leading to an explosive gunfight. The thriller provides airtime for some of the villains, too, most notably Chris Martinez and Jimmy Sanchez, frivolously spending money they didn’t earn. Rupp devotes too many pages to the Animals’ downtime: they frequent bars, go shopping to spend Coleen’s travel allowance, and enjoy a barbecue in Dick’s parents’ backyard. Though these scenes dampen suspense, they do give time for Dick and Coleen’s mutual physical attraction to build. The Animals nearly bow out for the final act since they need permission to pursue suspects in Mexico, but the novel speeds through another action sequence and a twist before reaching a gratifying conclusion.
Don’t be fooled by the white-collar title; there’s plenty of bullets, tension, and old-fashioned police work.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4808-1965-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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by J.A. Jance ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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New York Times Bestseller
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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