The weightless style is Woods’, but the smartly engineered complications involving multiple malefactors who plot at serenely...
Perennial bestseller Woods and veteran Hall, who’ve already teamed up to spin a yarn starring Teddy Fay, the ex–CIA operative gone spectacularly rogue (Smooth Operator, 2016), give New York attorney Stone Barrington’s rising-star partner and former client Herbie Fisher a case of his own.
Not that it’s really Herbie’s case. He’s just the lawyer at Woodman & Weld who answers the phone when his colleague James Glick, stricken with appendicitis, is looking for someone, anyone, to take his place in the courtroom and appear on behalf of David Ross, a pre-law student at Columbia caught at a party with a pocketful of cocaine, whose father, a city councilman, has arranged a sweetheart plea bargain that will keep his son out of jail. The plea bargain is authentic, but the appendicitis isn’t: Glick’s desperate to get out from under the demand that he lose the case pronto so that David will go to jail, where vengeful real estate mogul Jules Kenworth can use his vulnerable position to keep putting pressure on the councilman. And the kid, insisting that he’s innocent, refuses to take the deal. So Herbie, who thought he’d be spending 10 minutes in court, ends up cross-examining witnesses whose testimonies he knows nothing about and, in the process, mightily, though unwittingly, angering Tommy Taperelli, the fixer Kenworth has engaged to ensure a guilty verdict. Dazed and confused, Herbie can hardly wait to return to his Park Avenue penthouse to spend some quality time with his fiancee, Yvette Walker, an actress out of the Yale Drama School. Now if only Yvette weren’t really a call girl up to her neck in a scheme to fleece Herbie and leave him at the altar holding the bag….
The weightless style is Woods’, but the smartly engineered complications involving multiple malefactors who plot at serenely oblivious cross-purposes are right out of Hall’s stories about sad-sack private eye Stanley Hastings. Woods, who’s often mysteriously immune to plotting, may have found the perfect partner.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1723-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
British journalist Logan’s first foray into crime fiction is an adrenaline-fueled page-turner that explores the fragility of...
A spur-of-the-moment detour leads to disaster in this psychological thriller debut.
Joseph Lynch and his 4-year-old son, William, are navigating North London traffic when William spots his mother’s car exiting the highway. William wants to surprise Melissa, so they follow her to the Premier Inn, where Joe assumes she’s meeting a client; instead, they find Mel in the hotel bar, arguing with her best friend’s husband, tech millionaire Ben Delaney. Mel flees before Joe can flag her down, so he confronts Ben, who denies having seen Mel. The ensuing scuffle ends with Ben’s striking his head on the parking garage floor and losing consciousness. Joe takes William home and then returns to the hotel, but Ben and his vehicle are gone. Also missing is Joe’s phone, which he lost in the fray. Later that night, Joe interrogates Mel, who insists that the rendezvous was business-related. Joe initially believes her, but it’s not long until he realizes that his wife is lying—and that thanks to her vengeful lover, his marriage isn’t the only thing in jeopardy. Logan writes viscerally about the emotional devastation wrought by marital infidelity. Joe’s heartbreak and desolation are palpable, the tale cunningly exploits the paranoia that springs from fractured trust, and although Logan fails to fully earn his twisting plot’s final turn, the ending still packs a punch.
British journalist Logan’s first foray into crime fiction is an adrenaline-fueled page-turner that explores the fragility of domestic bliss.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-18226-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
If you’re in a receptive mood, nobody evokes long postwar shadows or overwhelming postwar grief better than Todd.
Inspector Ian Rutledge’s 22nd case revolves around two young women found dead in utterly unexpected places.
Scheduled to give evidence in an ongoing investigation, Rutledge can’t go to the village of Avebury—where a body has been found stabbed to death in the center of a circle of prehistoric stones—in the place of Chief Inspector Brian Leslie when Rutledge’s nemesis, Chief Superintendent Markham, sends Leslie there when he'd been looking forward to a couple of days off. Instead, Rutledge ends up going to the Shropshire village of Tern Bridge, where a woman eventually identified as Bath schoolmistress Serena Palmer has been stabbed and tossed into a grave dug the day before for someone else. After a witness’s unexpectedly keen eye and sharp memory puts Rutledge on a trail that leads with disconcerting suddenness to Serena Palmer’s killer, he’s sent to Avebury after all, since Leslie’s conscientiously thorough inquiries have identified neither the killer nor the victim. This mystery, Rutledge finds, is just as murky as the Shropshire murder was clear, and he despairs that he’ll ever have anything to add to Leslie’s report. Constantly threatened by Markham, who’s still holding the letter of resignation Rutledge submitted to him after his last case (The Black Ascot, 2019, etc.), and intermittently needled by the ghost of Cpl. Hamish McLeod, the corporal he executed in a trench in 1916 when he refused to lead troops into further fighting in the Somme, Rutledge struggles with a case whose every lead—a necklace of lapis lazuli beads, a trove of letters written to the victim—leads him not so much to enlightenment as to ever deepening sadness. The final twist may not surprise eagle-eyed readers, but it will reveal why Todd’s generic-sounding title is painfully apt.
If you’re in a receptive mood, nobody evokes long postwar shadows or overwhelming postwar grief better than Todd.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-290553-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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