Ignore the tangled plot and enjoy the raucous close-ups and the joyous, unsavory overview of contemporary Detroit.
Ex-cop and philanthropist August Octavio Snow gets backed into a third case that shows once again that all Detroit politics is personal in good ways and bad.
As he's dying of lymphoma, Ronaldo Ochoa is pressed to sell his Mexicantown corn and flour business, Authentico Foods, to a shadowy real estate speculator named Sloane, who claims he’s fronting for billionaire developer Vic Bronson. Fearing that the buyer, whoever it is, will tear down the place and put up another ghost town of faceless residential buildings that will denature the neighborhood, Ochoa wants to sell the business to Snow—the son of a Mexican mother and Black father—for a third of the price Sloane has offered. It doesn't sound like a good idea to Snow even though he's sitting on the $12 million he was awarded in the wrongful termination suit he filed against the Detroit PD. But Snow can’t turn away when Ochoa is killed and his daughter, Snow’s old high school crush Jackie Ochoa, begs him for a more familiar kind of help. In no time at all, Snow’s up to his neck in civic corruption that reaches as high as City Council President Lincoln Quinn, who’d been a leader in calling for Snow’s dismissal. Hardball politics, blackmail, abduction, and beheading will be overlaid atop the city’s susurrus of combustible racial strife. The one bright spot is Snow’s reunion with German Somali ex-bartender Tatina Stadtmueller, who mitigates her outrage at every vigilante step he takes long enough to join him in a commitment ceremony. Could matrimony be next for the hometown hero who proudly announces, “I’m the Blaxican”?
Ignore the tangled plot and enjoy the raucous close-ups and the joyous, unsavory overview of contemporary Detroit.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-641-29102-6
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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
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