“War is what I do,” Pike tells Azzara when they first square off. Roger that, and prepare the body bags.
Having taken on the Serbian mob (The First Rule, 2010), soldier of fortune Joe Pike is ready for a slickly plotted encounter with drug-dealing Bolivians and their strongmen.
Stopping at a service station to top off one of his Jeep’s tires, Pike spots two suspicious men entering a sandwich shop. Moments later, he follows and finds them beating and kicking the owner, Wilson Smith. Attacked by Pike, one assailant flees and the other is swiftly subdued and waiting for the police. But Smith doesn’t want the police, and he doesn’t want the medical care he obviously needs; all he wants is for everybody to leave him alone. When his niece Dru Rayne calls Pike the following morning to tell him that someone’s returned to vandalize the shop, Pike realizes that keeping predators off Smith’s back could amount to full-time work. Working his connections in L.A.’s Ghost Town, he arranges a meeting with up-and-coming gang lord Miguel Azzara, who assures him that Smith’s attackers, Reuben Mendoza and Alberto Gomer, won’t be back. So Pike relaxes enough to take warm, appealing Dru out for a beer and wonder whether she could become the special lady in his life. But the point becomes moot when another call tells him that Smith and his niece have vanished, and not simply because they left for Oregon until things cooled down, as Smith maintained in a phone call. Have they been kidnapped or killed? Why didn’t Azzara protect them? Are the culprits Mendoza and Gomer, or other players in the shadowy game Pike’s walked into? The high-profile involvement of Pike’s ex-colleague Det. Jerry Button of the LAPD and Jack Straw of the FBI alerts Pike and his partner, Elvis Cole, that this case has always been about more than assault and battery. But they aren’t prepared for a series of revelations that make every player’s story suspect.
“War is what I do,” Pike tells Azzara when they first square off. Roger that, and prepare the body bags.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-15707-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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