Characters you care about plunged into mysterious circumstances.
A newly minted Garda helps solve a highly publicized case.
After years as a detective on Long Island, Maggie D’arcy has relocated to Dublin to live with her boyfriend and train for the Garda. Given all her experience, she’s frustrated to be on street patrol, but DI Roly Byrne, whom she’d worked with on several cases before becoming a Garda, wants to expedite her move to detective. Her chance comes when a woman is murdered and her child stolen in the neighborhood patrolled by Maggie and her partner, Jason Savage. Jade Elliott was a gorgeous young model who got pregnant and kept now-2-year-old Laurel but refused to stay with the father, Dylan Maguire, a well-to-do older man who still pays her bills. Finding phone numbers for Dylan and Jade’s sister and mother, Maggie and Jason call around, but none of them have Laurel. Because the crime took place in Maggie's area, Byrne gets her temporarily assigned to the case, whose combination of a missing toddler and a murdered beauty has provoked a nationwide sensation. Using her nose for sleuthing, Maggie follows up numerous leads and turns up some clues, but Laurel remains missing. Jade, who had made some dicey connections in her modeling career, had a mother with mental health issues and an older sister who wasn’t up to helping out. Maggie senses that the sister is hiding something and also suspects Dylan, who has a solid alibi but gives off an odd vibe. Some old-fashioned police work, luck, and hunches will lead to a killer.
Characters you care about plunged into mysterious circumstances.Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781250826688
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Excitement for series fans looking to revisit Bentz and Montoya’s greatest hits while promising something new for the future.
Is the potential return of a series villain the end for a clever detective and his daughter, a true-crime author, in the last book in Jackson’s Rick Bentz and Reuben Montoya series?
On the streets of the French Quarter of New Orleans, an unnamed killer is plotting his next crime with satisfaction. He’s been waiting a long time to go after Kristi Bentz and end her string of true-crime bestsellers. But when the murderer makes his move, he’s thrown off course by the unexpected arrival of Kristi’s husband, Jay McKnight. In the ensuing struggle, Jay is killed and Kristi left in shock. Her father, Det. Rick Bentz, wants to comfort his daughter, but he and partner Det. Reuben Montoya have other things to worry about when an earlier case resurfaces in a way that seems impossible. They’d thought Father John, a fake priest obsessed with killing women in the name of God, was dead after their last face-off, but their most recent string of cases follow his M.O. to a T: working girls choked to death by a string of sharpened rosary beads. Is Father John back, or do Bentz and Montoya have a copycat on their hands? The case is clearly linked to Kristi, who wrote a hit book on the so-called Rosary Killer and whose agent is demanding she do press and a follow-up volume. As Kristi worries that the unnamed killer may just be waiting to strike again, help arrives in the form of mysterious stranger Cruz Montoya, Reuben’s brother, who may need Kristi’s help.
Excitement for series fans looking to revisit Bentz and Montoya’s greatest hits while promising something new for the future.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9781496739056
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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