A new high note is sounded in the latest installment of the longstanding, outstanding, Edgar Awardwinning series; almost in spite of himself, Jimmy Flannery's political star just keeps on rising (The Lion's Share, 1996, etc.). Now, ``they''—the powerbrokers in Chicago's Democratic Party—want their illustrious sewer inspector to run for warlord (committeeman) of the 11th ward. Which is the Mayor's Ward. Which is clearly prestigious. Which is a long and hazardous step out of comfortable obscurity into a world full of public and punishing glare. It's a step fraught with implications. For one thing, it would require Jimmy to resign as committeeman of the hardscrabble 27th, where he knows how to operate for a needy constituency, and where he has never had to ``swallow anything I couldn't swallow.'' The proposition flatters him, but it also makes him undeniably nervous. And not just because of the politics. There's also the thorny alliance Jimmy will be forced into with former Congressman Leo the Lion Lundatos, currently doing 28 months for a series of malfeasances. There's the allure of the dazzlingly beautiful Maggie Lundatos, Leo's wife, who stirs Jimmy in a way that only Mary, his adored, has been able to do until now. Then, too, there's the threat posed by a pair of muscle-bound ex-cons who think broken bones whenever they think of Jimmy. And most unsettling of all, there are the complications resulting from the murder of his lovely friend Mabel Halstead—who used to be his loyal friend Milton Halstead. Was that a hate crime, someone's mindless vendetta against the transgenderized? Or were the bullets that took out Mabel really meant for Jimmy? The famous Campbell dialogue has never been more amiably quirky—or more polished—and as for Jimmy, the once and ever reluctant pol, long may he run.
Pub Date: April 14, 1998
ISBN: 0-89296-665-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
This tense psychological thriller shows Hoag at the top of her game.
In Hoag’s (Cold, Cold Heart, 2015, etc.) latest, Minneapolis homicide detective Sam Kovac has been separated from his longtime partner, the diminutive yet hard-charging Nikki Liska.
Nikki wanted more time with her teenage sons, so she sought assignment to the department’s new cold case unit, where she's intrigued by the decades-old unsolved murder of Ted Duffy, a sex crimes detective, despite push back from a retired detective close to his family. Sam’s first case without Nikki is the double murder—"raw animal violence"—of Lucien Chamberlain, an Asian studies professor, and his wife, Sondra, who were slashed to death with the professor’s own antique samurai weapons. Chamberlain was an egotistical, misogynistic megalomaniac. Even his adult children hated him. Son Charles is damned by OCD and his father’s unachievable expectations. Daughter Diana is bipolar and hypersexual. Nikki's and Sam’s cases become parallel stories of anger, isolation, ambition, violence, revenge, and perversion. With Duffy’s widow married to his prosperous twin brother and reluctant to cooperate, Nikki has no lead until she discovers Evi, Duffy’s long-ago foster child. Sam has too many suspects, including an ex-con working for a handyman service, Charles and Diana, and professor Ken Sato, Diana’s lover and Lucien’s rival for department chair. Hoag adds depth to the tale with secondary characters like the preening Sato; fragile librarian Jennifer Duffy, broken and isolated by her father’s murder; and the new homicide lieutenant, Joan Mascherino, who's tough-minded and empathetic, with knife-keen intelligence hidden under a prim personality intolerant of swearing. With an ear for sardonic cop dialogue and humor—Sondra Chamberlain regularly ended her day with a "bottle of Chateau Blackout"—Hoag livens up these two already fast-paced, ripped-from-the-headlines mysteries with interesting factoids about such things as the history of female samurai.
This tense psychological thriller shows Hoag at the top of her game.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-95455-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Gardner tacks on so many twists that even the most astute reader will be confused, and even the intriguing resolution, when...
A New Hampshire cop tries to piece together a mysterious woman’s life following a car accident and discovers nothing is as it seems.
Gardner (Fear Nothing, 2014, etc.) puts Sgt. Wyatt Foster front and center in this overly complicated thriller, while corporate security expert—and Foster’s new girlfriend—Tessa Leoni, from the 2011 Love You More, plays a distant second fiddle. When Foster is called to a single-car accident on a rural road, it seems like driver Nicole Frank simply drank too much Scotch and drove off the road. But Nicole, who miraculously survives the crash, insists that her daughter, Vero, is still missing. Foster and his team launch a massive search until Nicole’s husband, Thomas, arrives at the hospital and tells the police that there is no child: Nicole suffered a traumatic brain injury (actually several), causing her to conjure an imaginary daughter. As the details of Nicole’s original injury—she suspiciously fell down both her basement and front stairs within the span of a few months—emerge, Foster and the reader become more, rather than less, confused. Nicole’s history unspools in calculated sound bites, with each episode ending in an artificial cliffhanger. According to Nicole—who claims to be “the woman who died twice”—she escaped a horrific childhood in a brothel known as the Dollhouse, a place that’s the nexus of the mystery surrounding Vero, who may or may not be a figment of her addled brain.
Gardner tacks on so many twists that even the most astute reader will be confused, and even the intriguing resolution, when it finally comes, doesn’t answer all the plot’s unnecessary questions.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-95456-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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