Shames’ second (A Killing at Cotton Hill, 2013) is a nifty whodunit whose broad range of characters successfully captures...
A retired sheriff takes on a tricky case of murder.
Jarrett Creek is one of those East Texas towns where most people know your business and football is king. The locals are in a bad mood when their team loses the first game of the season after the popular coach inexplicably benches the star quarterback. Former star quarterback Jack Harbin is a regular at the games even though he’s blind and lost a leg in the Gulf War. He and his best buddy, Woody Patterson, had enlisted together, but when Woody was turned down, he married the lovely and popular Taylor, who’d never been able to make up her mind between them. Although Taylor’s now remarried to a lawyer, Jack still isn’t talking to Woody. Abandoned by a mother who left town when she couldn’t take the strain, Jack’s been cared for by his father, Bob. When Bob suddenly dies of an apparent heart attack, various townspeople join Jack’s veteran buddies to help out until Jack is viciously stabbed to death. Since the sheriff is a drunk who’s currently drying out, the town council asks former sheriff Samuel Craddock to find the killer. Atop his list of suspects is Jack’s brother Curtis, who lives with his wife, Taylor’s sister, and their children in a compound near Waco peopled by paranoid crazies. Curtis, who never liked his brother, stands to inherit a large sum. But Sam, whose skills are sharp as ever, starts to uncover some strange things in Jack’s past and finds $10,000 missing from Jack’s bank account.
Shames’ second (A Killing at Cotton Hill, 2013) is a nifty whodunit whose broad range of characters successfully captures the flavor of small-town Texas.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-871-3
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”
Once again, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett gets mixed up in a killing whose principal suspect is his old friend Nate Romanowski, whose attempts to live off the grid keep breaking down in a series of felony charges.
If Judge Hewitt hadn’t bent over to pick up a spoon that had fallen from his dinner table, the sniper set up nearly a mile from his house in the gated community of the Eagle Mountain Club would have ended his life. As it was, the victim was Sue Hewitt, leaving the judge alive and free to rail and threaten anyone he suspected of the shooting. Incoming Twelve Sleep County Sheriff Brendan Kapelow’s interest in using the case to promote his political ambitions and the judge’s inability to see further than his nose make them the perfect targets for a frame-up of Nate, who just wants to be left alone in the middle of nowhere to train his falcons and help his bride, Liv Brannon, raise their baby, Kestrel. Nor are the sniper, the sheriff, and the judge Nate’s only enemies. Orlando Panfile has been sent to Wyoming by the Sinaloan drug cartel to avenge the deaths of the four assassins whose careers Nate and Joe ended last time out (Wolf Pack, 2019). So it’s up to Joe, with some timely data from his librarian wife, Marybeth, to hire a lawyer for Nate, make sure he doesn’t bust out of jail before his trial, identify the real sniper, who continues to take an active role in the proceedings, and somehow protect him from a killer who regards Nate’s arrest as an unwelcome complication. That’s quite a tall order for someone who can’t shoot straight, who keeps wrecking his state-issued vehicles, and whose appalling mother-in-law, Missy Vankeuren Hand, has returned from her latest European jaunt to suck up all the oxygen in Twelve Sleep County to hustle some illegal drugs for her cancer-stricken sixth husband. But fans of this outstanding series will know better than to place their money against Joe.
One protest from an outraged innocent says it all: “This is America. This is Wyoming.”Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53823-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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