Social tensions redoubled by race intensify a workmanlike mystery.
African American lawyer Bocephus Haynes accepts a second case guaranteed to set him against pretty much everybody of all races in Giles County, Tennessee.
Minutes after her last tender moments with star high school running back Odell Champagne, Brittany Crutcher, the lead singer for the rising teen band Fizz, leaves a note in his locker telling him she’s leaving the next morning for LA after signing a solo contract that will leave Fizz out in the cold along with Odell. When he sees the note, Odell, having just dominated the intervening football game and heard Fizz crush the halftime show, is enraged, so when a sanitation worker finds Brittany dead in the back of a school bus the next morning, her head smashed in by a beer bottle, it's no surprise that Odell’s prints are all over it or that Chief Deputy Sheriff Frannie Storm arrests Odell for murder. Facing certain conviction, Odell begs Bo Haynes, whom he’s idolized ever since Bo’s own football days at Giles County High, to defend him. Bo takes his sweet time before committing himself, realizing that although both the victim and the defendant are Black, there are difficult racial currents at work. Also, taking the case will antagonize everyone from District Attorney General Helen Lewis to Israel Crutcher, Brittany’s father, who vows violent revenge against anyone who sides with Odell. And there turns out to be good reason for his hesitation, for his own search for an alternative suspect in Michael Zannick, the White manager who landed Brittany’s contract in return for the usual personal accommodations, is torpedoed when Zannick produces an alibi from a wholly unexpected source.
Social tensions redoubled by race intensify a workmanlike mystery.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2593-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Come for the forensics, stay for the nonhumans.
A Christmas bout between Kay Scarpetta and the Phantom Slasher.
But first, Scarpetta, Virginia’s chief medical examiner, has to figure out how software designer Rowdy O’Leary died. Fished from the Potomac River on Christmas Eve six years after a hit-and-run driver left him permanently disabled and a week after he plunked down the cash for a pricey emerald ring, he fell off his fishing perch and drowned—or did he? Scarpetta’s examination of his body is cut short by two disturbing developments: the discovery of an unidentified woman’s remains buried on the grounds of Mercy Psychiatric Hospital, and celebrity TV reporter Dana Diletti’s report that the red-eyed ghost associated with the Slasher’s three murders has floated through the window of her home. She’s got video, too, and the apparition looks real and scary. The final blow to Scarpetta’s plans for a Christmas getaway with her husband, Secret Service forensic psychologist Benton Wesley, is an attack on an Alexandria home that kills Mercy psychiatrist Georgine Duvall, who used to treat Scarpetta’s niece, Lucy Farinelli, and nearly kills graduate student Zain Willard, White House intern and nephew of presidential candidate Sen. Calvin Willard. This time the Slasher’s ghost has been spotted on the scene by none other than Pete Marino, head of investigations for the medical examiner’s office and Scarpetta’s longtime sidekick. Cornwell’s use of Robbie, Zain’s robotic dog, and Janet, Lucy’s AI companion, integrates the futuristic elements she favors more successfully than in her recent outings. But the solutions to all these mysteries will leave fans of the venerable franchise pursing their lips rather than gasping in awe.
Come for the forensics, stay for the nonhumans.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781538773963
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon.
Pynchon returns, this time with a wacky whodunit that spans two continents.
What’s a sub without cheese? That’s not to be taken literally, like so much of Pynchon. The sub in question is a German one plying, in an unlikely scenario, the depths of Lake Michigan. There, in Milwaukee, we find Hicks McTaggart, gumshoe, who “has been ankling around the Third Ward all day keeping an eye on a couple of tourists in Borsalinos and black camel hair overcoats from the home office at 22nd and Wabash down the Lake”—the Chicago mob, in other words, drawn to Milwaukee in the void created by the absence of one Bruno Airmont, “the Al Capone of Cheese in Exile,” having legged it with a trunkload of cash some years earlier. Where could Bruno be? And why are those Germans, in those prewar days of Depression and protonationalism, skulking about under the waves? McTaggart will soon find out, sort of, having already been exposed to plenty of chatter—for, “this being Wisconsin, where you find more varieties of social thought than Heinz has pickles, over the years German American politics has only kept growing into a game more and more complicated.” Complicated it is. Trying to keep tabs on the twists and turns of Pynchon’s plot is a fool’s errand, but suffice it to say that it involves bowling, Les Paul, organized crime, Count Basie, a Russian bike gang, Nazis, and, yes, cheese, as well as some lovely psychedelic moments, including one where “fascist daredevil aviators are playing poker with Yangtze Patrol veterans who believe all that airplanes are good for is to be shot down.” Pynchon did the private dick thing to better effect in Inherent Vice (2009), a superior yarn in nearly every respect, so this one earns only an average grade—but then, middling Pynchon is better than a whole lot of writers’ best.
A careening, oddly timely tour of recent history, and trademark Pynchon.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781594206108
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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