Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT

Next book

OPEN WOUND

A suspenseful and often gripping thriller that features plenty of murder and menace for genre fans.

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT

The serial executions of New York City policemen spurs a retired cop to action in this crime novel.

Takemoto’s debut novel, Bio-Justice (2017), was an SF thriller, but this sophomore effort is a straightforward police procedural with plenty of mayhem and intrigue. As the story opens, it’s the summer of 1996, and recently retired, well-known Los Angeles detective Douglas Hale, who’s nearing 50, is preparing to relocate to New York City. However, at the moment, there’s a serial murderer on the loose in Manhattan who’s targeting police officers and collecting their badges as grisly souvenirs. Soon after Doug and his new wife, technology company executive Karen, arrive in the city and get settled, a new issue of Time magazine comes out with Doug’s photo on the cover—the result of a high-profile interview he gave before he left LA. This places him right in the killer’s crosshairs—and it soon becomes clear that the young murderer has a vicious, personal vendetta against the former cop. The delusional killer is a well-developed character, and the author fleshes out his motives with skill, revealing him to be the son of Doug’s former girlfriend, a drug addict. Indeed, Takemoto embodies the murderer with so much anger and resentment that he becomes a veritable monster prowling the streets of Manhattan. The revelation of the murderer’s identity happens early in the narrative, which stunts the suspense a bit. However, the author proves to be a keen storyteller who knows his way around a police procedural, and he keeps the action breathless while also offering plenty of detail.

A New York City police chief briefs Doug on the recent cop killings and begs for his seasoned expertise to help solve the case before he loses more officers. Of course, Doug agrees, and the story pivots straight into the mind of the killer, resulting in an action-packed cat-and-mouse thriller that puts Doug, his new bride, and several others in mortal danger. The murderer, who’s revealed to be a victim of severe physical abuse, meticulously plans out a “nice and slow” slaughter of Doug, which he sees as “a family reunion and a funeral wrapped into one.” Doug is shown to be a formidable policeman who immediately gets down to the work he’s known for by retracing his ex-girlfriend’s life among drug dealers in the hope of tracking down her abandoned son before he kills again. Along the way, Takemoto effectively incorporates social commentary on dysfunctional foster care and mental health systems into his story. Doug and Karen are instantly likable characters made believable by their nagging insecurities, petty jealousies, and past long-term relationships. As the investigation heats up, so does the melodrama between Karen and Doug, and the latter eventually comes face to face with the killer in one of the book’s more gruesome scenes. The story speeds along to a heart-pounding finale that thankfully leaves room for possible future installments detailing Doug’s further adventures.

A suspenseful and often gripping thriller that features plenty of murder and menace for genre fans.

Pub Date: July 16, 2020

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 218

Publisher: Self

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020

Next book

TELL ME WHAT YOU DID

Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.

A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.

Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?

Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.

Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025

ISBN: 9781464226229

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Poisoned Pen

Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024

Next book

A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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

Close Quickview