Lakin’s frantic pace and manic dialogue don’t do much to sell her heroine as a force to be reckoned with, and her...
Florida senior Gladdy Gold (Getting Old Can Kill You, 2017, etc.) helps a friend deal with an obstreperous grandchild.
Teenager Tori Steiner has plenty to be mad about. Her parents were bank robbers dumb enough to get caught hiding in a storm drain during a flash flood. Her dad was reported drowned, and her pregnant mother ended up in the slammer. Since there was no room in her mom’s cell for an infant, Tori was placed on arrival with her Grandma Ida, who made it through two years of child-rearing before taking off for Fort Lauderdale, dumping Tori and her two older sisters on Grandma and Grandpa Steiner. Raising three kids in a run-down tract house in Panorama City hasn’t really suited the tightfisted Steiners, and by the time Tori reaches her midteens, she’s had it. So she thumbs a ride to Florida's east coast, buoyed by the notion that her father isn’t really dead after all but is hiding out somewhere in eastern Florida. When Tori lands in Lanai Gardens, her grandma’s new home, she displays all the winning ways that made Ida flee in the first place: defying, demanding, and throwing tantrums when she doesn’t get her way. Fortunately, Ida’s got her own group of supportive seniors, led by Gladdy, who step in to keep the peace.
Lakin’s frantic pace and manic dialogue don’t do much to sell her heroine as a force to be reckoned with, and her detective’s “funny, adorable and sometimes impossible partners” are more tedious than any of the above.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8806-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Middling for this standout series but guaranteed to please anyone who thinks the cops sometimes get it wrong.
A cold case pulls Harry Bosch back from retirement and into another eventful partnership with Detective Renée Ballard of the LAPD.
The widow of Bosch’s retired mentor, Detective John Jack Thompson, has a present for Bosch, and it’s a doozy: the murder book for the unsolved killing of ex-con John Hilton, shot to death in his car one night nearly 20 years ago, which Thompson swiped from the archives without authorization or explanation. Bosch, who wonders why Thompson lifted the murder book if he didn’t intend to work the case, is eager to take a crack at it himself, but he needs the resources that only an active partner can provide. But Ballard, settled into the routine of the midnight shift after her exile from Robbery-Homicide (Dark Sacred Night, 2018), has just started working her own case, the arson that killed Eddie, a homeless man, inside his tent. As if that’s not enough criminal activity, Bosch’s half brother, Lincoln lawyer Mickey Haller, faces the apparently hopeless defense of Jeffrey Herstadt, who not only left his DNA under the fingernail of Walter Montgomery, the Superior Court judge he’s accused of killing, but also obligingly confessed to the murder. Working sometimes in tandem, more often separately, and sometimes actively against the cops who naturally bridle at the suggestion that any of their own theories or arrests might be flawed, Ballard and Bosch slog through the usual dead ends and fruitless rounds of questioning to link two murders separated by many years to a single hired killer. The most mysterious question of all—why did John Jack Thompson steal that murder book in the first place?—is answered suddenly, casually, and surprisingly.
Middling for this standout series but guaranteed to please anyone who thinks the cops sometimes get it wrong.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-48561-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
Even readers who identify the criminal, motive, and modus operandi early on (and many readers will) can plan to stay up long...
Soldier-turned-soldier-of-fortune Jack Reacher goes after a serial killer in a conventionally but nonetheless deeply satisfying whodunit.
In today's armed services, you lose even when you win—at least if you're a woman who files a sexual harassment complaint. Amy Callan and Caroline Cooke were both successful in their suits, which ended the careers of their alleged harassers. But Callan and Cooke ended up leaving the service themselves, and now they're both dead, murdered by a diabolical perp who keeps leaving behind the same crime scene—the victim's body submerged in a bathtub filled with camouflage paint—and not a single clue to the killer's identity or the cause of death. The FBI hauls in Reacher, who handled both women's complaints as an Army MP, as a prime suspect, then offers to upgrade him to a consulting investigator when their own surveillance gives him an alibi for a third killing. No thanks, says our hero, who's taken an instant dislike to FBI profiler Julia Lamarr, until the Feds' threats against his lawyer girlfriend Jodie Jacob (Tripwire, 1999) bring him into the fold. While Reacher is pretending to study lists of potential victims and suspects and fending off the government-sponsored advances of Quantico's comely Lisa Harper, the murderer is getting ready to pounce on a fourth victim: Lamarr's stepsister Alison. This latest coup does nothing to improve relations between Reacher and the Feebees, all of them determined to prove they're the toughest hombres in the parking lot, but it does set the stage for some honest sleuthing, some treacherous red herrings, and some convincing evidence for Reacher's assertion that all that profiling stuff is just plain common sense.
Even readers who identify the criminal, motive, and modus operandi early on (and many readers will) can plan to stay up long past bedtime and do some serious hyperventilating toward the end.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-399-14623-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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