A fast-paced and satisfying tale of the Mafia and murder on old Cape Cod.
The law and the mob clash in 1950s Cape Cod.
As the third volume in Cochran’s series opens, his hero, retired “Cape Cod basketball legend” and special police consultant Rob Caldwell, is dealing with several virtually simultaneous emotional revelations: Rachel, the woman he loves who had long been married to his best friend, has agreed to marry him, and his grandfather, the most influential person in Bound Brook (on Cape Cod), has been murdered and has left a private note for Rob, apologizing for a lifetime of neglect and injustice. The Mafia is making inroads into Bound Brook, which not only involves Rob’s grandfather but also recurring series character Rocco Marini, a former Mafia enforcer who’s been sent to find the daughter of a Mob-connected man in France (not knowing that this woman and her children are deeply connected to some of the people he’ll meet when he brings them to Bound Brook). “The Mafia didn’t like witnesses and tended to take a scorched-earth approach to their problems,” Rocco reflects about his erstwhile employers. The situation is further complicated by the presence of State Trooper Mike O’Connor, who is hopelessly in debt to the local Mafia boss. This is the third entry in the Bound Brook Cape Cod series that has followed the personal and romantic complications of Rob and Rachel in a fictionalized Cape Cod. Cochran assures his readers that each book in the series can be read independently, and he’s right; the author unobtrusively fills new readers in on all the context they need in order to understand the many personal issues at stake in this volume, from the somber undertones of Rob’s relationship drama to the inner personal transformation of Rachel’s former husband, who hopes he can be a better friend than he ever was a husband. Cochran evocatively captures the feeling of a bygone Cape Cod at season’s end, and he fills his story with characters readers will want to cheer—particularly Rocco, who steals the novel.
A fast-paced and satisfying tale of the Mafia and murder on old Cape Cod.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 9798744220389
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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