Competent, but its Edgar-, Anthony-, and Shamus-winning predecessor, Southtown (2003), prompted expectations of something...
Riordan’s Texas p.i. with a degree in Medieval Lit is up to his anomalous old tricks, this time trying to crack a cold case while being chased by hot cops.
The San Antonio police don’t like Tres Navarre the least little bit. And they have their reasons. Item: a certain semi-disreputable friend of his, Ralph Arguello, is believed to have pumped a bullet into the chest of his wife, who happens to be homicide sergeant Ana DeLeon. Item: she’s now comatose, prognosis as dismal as it can get. Item: Tres has gone on the lam with would-be cop-killer Arguello, and the SAPD, in no mood to make nice distinctions, regards this move as big-time guilt by association. Of course, there’s much more to all this than meets the eye. Item: Tres and Ralph have been buds since high school, the kind that have always responded to trouble by covering each other’s back. Item: Ralph adores his Ana, Tres knows, and wouldn’t harm a hair of her much-loved head. Item: there’s no real doubt in anyone’s mind that whatever happened in Ana’s kitchen is inextricably linked to whatever happened 18 years back on Mission Road, to a well-to-do young monster named Franklin White, remorseless murderer of a series of blameless young women. No question that White is extremely dead, clubbed repeatedly by someone intent on rendering him so. Not much question either that White deserved what he got. But who wielded the lethal club? Tres is convinced that Ana had at last penetrated the mystery, and that’s why she was attacked. In order to take the heat off his pal and himself, Tres will have to find out what she knew.
Competent, but its Edgar-, Anthony-, and Shamus-winning predecessor, Southtown (2003), prompted expectations of something more.Pub Date: July 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-553-80185-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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