Solid entertainment courtesy of this thriller’s cold but tenacious protagonist.
In this third installment of a series, a detective’s latest investigation puts him in the crosshairs of a dirty politician and a dangerous man with mob ties.
LAPD detective Matt Jones is on medical leave following a harrowing serial killer case in Philadelphia. Back in Los Angeles, he discovers that his shrink doesn’t think he’s ready to return to the field. As a result of the diagnosis, Matt’s supervisor assigns him a “murder lite.” It’s a body buried in Elysian Park, and cops soon identify 15-year-old Sophia Ramirez. She appears to be the victim of a rape/murder, but none of the evidence points to anyone. Matt does, however, discover a videotaped encounter between Sophia and Robert Gambini, the nephew of crime boss Joseph Gambini. Another buried body guides Matt to DMG Waste Management, a local company, and its three co-owners, who have a mysterious relationship with the younger Gambini. Now the detective surmises DMG is a site for drug distribution, but there’s an unexpected hurdle. Dee Colon, a powerful but corrupt city councilwoman, wants Matt to drop the co-owners as persons of interest in his investigation. This doesn’t prevent the detective from continuing surveillance on the men, so Colon retaliates by targeting his position and threatening to deport Sophia’s grieving parents. The councilwoman later indirectly condemns Matt on TV by making it seem as if he’s unconcerned with solving Sophia’s case. Meanwhile, Robert Gambini may be implementing more violent means to stop Matt; when the detective finds someone willing to talk, an assault in a heavily populated area results in deaths and injuries. Matt rushes to ensnare the murder suspects before he’s unemployed—or worse. With an early focus on the possible murderers, Ellis’ (The Love Killings, 2016, etc.) series entry is more thriller than mystery. The author works this to great effect as the story reveals the burden of unearthing evidence. Matt, for example, is fairly certain he’s found the right men for the crimes, but he must admit to the police chief, at least initially, that he has nothing substantial on them. He nevertheless knows without a doubt that Colon is deceitful, but she’s evidently too influential to touch, making her the tale’s most formidable villain. When Matt denies her unfounded accusations (including planted evidence), Colon says with a smile, “The trouble is that no one will ever believe it.” Ellis generates an impressive amount of suspense, particularly when Matt is trailing suspects: In one scene, he follows someone in a car, repeatedly altering his speed to maintain a reasonable distance before ultimately continuing on foot. As a detective, Matt is determined and typically humorless; he asks people direct questions and is often blunt. This makes for a somber narrative, especially coupled with Matt’s enduring Colon’s televised character assassination as well as a beat down or two. But the detective’s frankness also leads to brief conversations that, along with periodic action sequences, provide the book with a swift pace. Although this installment is not closely tied to the preceding two novels, its ending implies that Matt’s multivolume tale is far from over.
Solid entertainment courtesy of this thriller’s cold but tenacious protagonist.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-08-199925-4
Page Count: 334
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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