A motley assortment of bad guys will have readers struggling to remember the good guys, but in the end, the persistently...
In Saltzman’s debut procedural thriller, two Brooklyn patrolmen are upgraded to plainclothes officers to work a variety of cases and declare war against crime.
A routine traffic stop turns cops Bobby Salter and Vinny Serpintino into media darlings when they arrest two notorious drug suppliers and recover close to $2.5 million in laundered money. Their transfer to the plainclothes squad to stop a string of armed robberies increases the amount of lawbreaking they come across in New York. Before long, they’re facing murdered gang members, a rapist/murderer, gunrunners and a possible assassination. Saltzman’s novel is just as much about the criminals as it is the cops, if not more so. Most officers in Bobby and Vinny’s squad are provided an engaging back story—e.g., Angel, the sole female, who’s openly gay—but so are the members of the gang BoB (Band of Brothers), most notably the leader, Cha Cha. Not that the cops are nondescript, but they sometimes feel interchangeable: Officers move to other precincts, they retire or are killed, and Bobby is the only constant, having a significant role in all the cases. The shifting of characters or job locales allows for fresh settings, as well as an impressive range of crimes to tackle, but it also brightens the spotlight on the ever-present Bobby while most of his fellow law enforcers fade into the background. Meanwhile, the impressive depiction of the criminals is more distinctive: It’s difficult not to sympathize with Cha Cha, who deals in drugs, prostitution and murder, as he helplessly watches his soldiers being systematically eliminated; the rapist/murderer has an unsettling but unquestionably riveting perspective; and while Bobby and Vinny are rarely called by their titular nicknames, the villains sport garish but amusing sobriquets—e.g., D’Cool, Skunk and Caveman. Bobby, however, holds his own; even when two cadets are sent undercover to infiltrate a gang selling guns, they’re always sure to check in with Bobby, the cop who’s clearly spearheading the investigation.
A motley assortment of bad guys will have readers struggling to remember the good guys, but in the end, the persistently solid hero prevails.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1483906584
Page Count: 312
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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