This intense, gripping racetrack drama is a winner by a nose.
A husband and wife—entangled in a murder case—deal with conflicts and danger in this horse racing mystery.
Larry Potter, the racetrack veterinarian at Woodbine, near Toronto, gets involved in an investigation when Golden Boy, a colt starting with 50-to-1 odds, collapses and dies during the race. Toxicology tests and sleuthing reveal that a groom was paid to slip cocaine to Golden Boy, resulting in a heart attack. Larry’s wife, Inspector Jenna Lawson, gets roped in when the horse’s adulterous trainer, Clement Montgomery, is murdered and castrated in his apartment (The crime scene “was one of the most brutal Lawson had ever encountered”). Toronto businessman Jonathan Piggott is later killed in an identical manner. Jenna ultimately has Montgomery’s widow, Trish, arrested for her husband’s murder' despite her having little connection to Piggott. Jenna’s investigation of Montgomery’s killing leads to tension in her marriage. Larry had been longtime friends with both Montgomerys. After Jenna asks Larry to step back from the homicide probe, he instead redoubles his efforts to find the race fixer, hoping there is a connection to Montgomery’s murder that could clear Trish. His efforts eventually pay off but in a manner that puts him in peril. While Jenna admittedly has doubts about Trish’s guilt, it takes a third, identical homicide in upstate New York to have her team look at a different suspect. Yet even that effort isn’t enough to yield a neat conclusion. Davis’ thriller succeeds despite a handful of dubious narrative choices. Jenna opts for the obvious when she arrests Montgomery’s widow, despite Trish’s having a tenuous relationship with the second victim. Likewise, Larry goes against his wife’s wishes when he continues to investigate the killings, setting himself up for danger. But the author’s research lends authenticity to the novel’s horse racing and policing backdrops. In addition, his decision to tell the story from the perspectives of Larry, Jenna, and the unnamed serial killer, the only fully developed characters, proves effective. And, in an enjoyable twist, the case appears to be closed when it really isn’t. The positives decidedly outweigh the negatives in this engrossing whodunit.
This intense, gripping racetrack drama is a winner by a nose.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-03-914553-5
Page Count: 328
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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