Less a mystery, despite the multiple deaths by violence, than an old-fashioned tale of Boston’s political corruption that...
The receding floodwaters of a hurricane reveal corruption at both ends of the social spectrum in Detective Eddy Harkness’ Boston.
Harkness’ Narco-Intel unit is supposed to stick to drugs, all the drugs, and nothing but the drugs. But sometimes it’s hard to walk away from other problems, as it is when Harkness and his partner, Detective Patrick Fitzgerald, drive through the Lower South End to make sure it’s been evacuated in anticipation of fast-moving Hurricane X and discover two people who haven’t left: veteran drug dealer Levon Ashmont, because he’s dead, and his deaf nephew, whose mother never took the trouble to name him, because he’s chained to a nearby radiator. Anyone else who risked his life to rescue the boy would be hailed as a hero, but Harkness has too much history (Third Rail, 2014) for that. Instead, he resigns himself to following the trail of Dark Horse, the villainous new blend of high-grade heroin and cheap brown lactose Ashmont was peddling and using to his own grave detriment. Even after Dark Horse claims the lives of two Harvard undergrads, though, it’s clear that Harkness isn’t fully committed to the job of rooting it out. Instead, he focuses more closely on the Harbormasters, a well-connected civic organization that seems to be the power behind Mayor Michael O’Mara; the invasion of his own hometown by the dozens of “wanderers,” displaced Bostonians whom seamstress/activist Jennet Townsend has led to Nagog to take advantage of a 200-year-old law that allows them to squat in local homeowners’ unused outbuildings; and the ticklish question of when and where he should pop the question to Candace Hammond.
Less a mystery, despite the multiple deaths by violence, than an old-fashioned tale of Boston’s political corruption that reads like a more hard-knuckle version of The Lash Hurrah.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-25324-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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