A thrilling tale that delves into the family dynamics and challenges of running a business.
In this novel, ambition and greed cause a family to split apart, resulting in suffering that will last for decades.
From when they were children, Rudi and Gus Considine could not have been more different. While Gus did well in school, encouraged by his father to get a good education—eventually studying marketing—Rudi was the opposite. He left school at the age of 13 after receiving horrible, violent punishment from his teachers in response to his inability to read. He pleads with his father, Malachi, to let him work in his butcher shop and picks up the trade quickly. Soon, Rudi finds new and innovative ways to grow the business. He opens a meat-packing plant and several shops, eventually forging Hawthorne Meats Limited, using his keen business instincts as well as his fearsome determination. Rudi’s ambition soon brings him to the decision that he needs Malachi to use his land and home as collateral for bank loans to expand the business. Unfortunately, Malachi wants no part of this plan and Gus also rejects the idea, which ignites Rudi’s fierce anger and temper. Then Rudi’s friend and personal assistant, Kevin Quilty, speaks to his boss about a hypothetical strategy involving hiring someone to kill a person and using the family’s meatpacking facility to get rid of the body. Not long after the exchange, Rudi’s wife, Penny, finds Malachi at a hospital, dying of a gunshot wound. Following the funeral, Rudi approaches his brother about selling Malachi’s land to help the business and Gus once again refuses. In this novel, McKenna skillfully weaves together a story of one family through several decades, showing the changes Rudi and Gus go through and how their relationships with each other and the people around them transform through time. This is an engaging, fast-paced story filled with treachery, backstabbing, and blind ambition (“Nothing could tear Rudi away from the strategic and tactical imperatives involved in building up his business”). The narrative moves quickly and smoothly while managing to carefully construct the foundation for the brothers’ rivalry.
A thrilling tale that delves into the family dynamics and challenges of running a business.Pub Date: May 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781738541010
Page Count: 326
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.
Stephanie Plum’s 31st adventure shows that Trenton’s preeminent fugitive-apprehension agent still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve, and needs every one of them.
The current caseload for Stephanie and Lula—the ex-prostitute file clerk at her cousin Vincent Plum’s bail bonds company, who serves as her unflappable sidekick—begins with two “failures to appear.” Eugene Fleck is suspected of being Robin Hoodie, who robs from the rich and, yes, distributes the proceeds to the poor. Racketeer Bruno Jug, who’s missed his court date on charges of tax evasion, is also suspected of drugging and raping a 14-year-old. But neither of these fugitives can hold a candle to Zoran Djordjevic, aka Fang, a self-proclaimed vampire wanted in connection with the gruesome fate of his late wife and three other missing women. As usual, Stephanie’s personal life is just as helter-skelter as her professional life as a bounty hunter. She’s managed to get herself engaged both to Det. Joe Morelli, of the Trenton PD, and Ranger, a former Special Forces agent who runs a private security firm; she thinks she may be pregnant; and she’s willing to marry the father, whichever of her fiances that turns out to be. On top of it all, her nothingburger schoolmate Herbert Slovinski suddenly pops up at one of the funerals she ferries her Grandma Mazur to, hitting on her relentlessly and gilding his importunities by cleaning and painting her shabby apartment and laying new carpet. Luckily, Lula’s on hand to offer cupcakes that stave off the worst disasters, and whenever this hodgepodge threatens to slow down, another FTA appears, or fails to appear.
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781668003138
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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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