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
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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