Turow clearly had fun writing this one, and his fans will have fun reading it.
A private eye aids a police chief whose knickers may be in a twist.
In Highland Isle, Chief Lucia “Lucy” Gomez is accused of forcing a subordinate to have sex with her in exchange for his promotion to sergeant before his retirement. Unfortunately for the chief, there is a lurid photograph. But wait, she says, it must be Photoshopped. That can't be her. Well, we'll see about that. She's a “good police chief,” an attorney says. “But power corrupts. And she's turned her officers into her pool boys.” If a civil hearing determines that she’s been “bringing home guys who were under [her] command,” those knickers are well and truly twisted. Doing research on her behalf is the narrator, Clarice "Pinky" Granum, a 33-year-old ace investigator who works for the chief's lawyer, Rik Dudek. Gomez is a strong character, but she’s nothing like Pinky, the granddaughter of Sandy Stern, who has been a recurring character in Turow’s novels. Sandy is now in his mid-80s and in assisted living, where Pinky comes to visit. Pinky is a bisexual “inked-up chick” with a nail in her nose, and her ex-girlfriend is a “lumbersexual” cop named Tonya. Sandy is cool with all that as long as Pinky takes out the nail and wears long sleeves when necessary. She's very athletic, was once a police cadet, and is happy to be a “queerdo.” And wouldn't you know, she lives next door to a guy she calls The Weird One, or TWO, who she becomes convinced is a spy. Anyway, she’s skeptical about the chief forcing sex on a guy. “She's a woman, Boss. Men still hate it when a female does what she wants with her body. These dudes' stories make no sense." And then a witness named Blanco dies, raising the stakes. Did the chief have him whacked? Or maybe it was TWO, who is a Hmong guy named Koob, or a superrich ex-cop real estate mogul nicknamed the Ritz. Pinky and her colorful cohorts are the book's main appeal, but readers wanting gunplay won’t be disappointed.
Turow clearly had fun writing this one, and his fans will have fun reading it.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5-387-0632-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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