Somebody seems to have misplaced a reel between the High Noon build-up and the Fistful of Dollars finale. The...
Eight years after Spenser was shot and left for dead (Small Vices, 1997), it’s Hawk’s turn to seek revenge on his would-be killers.
The Ukrainian mob, branching out from Brooklyn to Beantown, wants to horn in on Luther Gillespie’s racket, so the bookie hires Hawk as his bodyguard. Result: Gillespie dead, most of his family ditto, Hawk shot three times in the back. Naturally, this will not stand; as soon as Hawk’s back in shape several months later, he’s eager to go after the shooters. Identifying five Ukrainian suspects is a snap, but when the DA’s office bobbles the case, Hawk and Spenser are left on their own, except for the sympathy of Susan, Spenser’s favorite shrink; Cecile, Hawk’s favorite thoracic surgeon; and the underhanded but heartfelt support of the Boston Police Department and the FBI. The shooters, it seems, are protected by Boots Podolak, the mayor and unofficial owner of Marshport, whose move into Boston is fully though unhappily supported by Massachusetts East mob kingpin Tony Marcus. Hawk’s problem, then, is to eliminate the button men and provide a trust fund for the surviving Gillespie boy without ruffling too many feathers of the mob, the Ukrainians, or their overlords, heroin-smuggling terrorists from Afghanistan (don’t ask). If this unusual diplomatic brief sounds fearfully complicated and well outside Hawk and Spenser’s usual field of expertise, don’t worry. It’s nothing that can’t be resolved by the condign application of baleful glares, well-chosen handguns, and a concentration of man’s-gotta-do wisdom that’s high even for this celebrated series (Bad Business, 2004, etc.).
Somebody seems to have misplaced a reel between the High Noon build-up and the Fistful of Dollars finale. The testosterone-laced attitudinizing is sharp and often compelling, though no substitute for an honest attempt to surmount difficulties that melt away instead at a touch of Spenser and Hawk’s magic hands.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-399-15240-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
