A brisk, enjoyable crime tale with a hazy Dublin setting.
An Irish cop teams up with an American detective to try to bring his partner’s killer to justice in this novella.
Jack Murphy is a bad man, and McBride’s police partner in Dublin was a good one. But he “liked to lay a bet more than most,” and Murphy preys on people’s wants and fears. McBride’s partner got in so deep, he lost his house and his wife and he took his own life. Or did he? It’s been months, and McBride needs a new partner. A program called the Agency Intelligence Swap is up and running, and Los Angeles Police Detective Booker has opted to participate. Partnered with McBride, Booker is worried about not fitting in (a request to hit up a Dunkin’ Donuts throws his new colleague into a paroxysm of laughter), but the two get along like bacon and cabbage. When Booker asks what their agenda is, McBride responds, “The same thing as yesterday and the day before that: Get Murphy.” Fans of the unconventional buddy comedy The Guard, which paired an independent Dublin cop with a Black FBI agent, may find this series opener a fleeting diversion. There are terse, clever bits that entertainingly illustrate the McBride-Murphy dynamic, as when McBride plants a tracker on the villain only to have him almost immediately drive up alongside the cop and throw it at his car window. There are enough unconventional action scenes and twists to keep interest from flagging across a mere 122 pages. References to Joe Biden in the White House and Covid-19 give Lawless’ story immediacy, but there is scant sense of place. Dublin is underutilized, as is the development of the new partners’ relationship (“The two detectives had gotten to know each other over the last few weeks”). Some Irish slang and colloquialisms such as thick are self-explanatory, but for others, like garda and gurrier, the Irish-to-American table that the author provides will come in handy.
A brisk, enjoyable crime tale with a hazy Dublin setting.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8-74-816265-4
Page Count: 122
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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