With Muñoz so fully drawn, it will be a pleasure to learn his fate.
Cohen (Frozen in Time, 2010) tenders part two of his murder and grand-theft trilogy, a fictionalized story inspired by real events.
The loot that was stolen in the first installment of this series—millions in cash, gold coins and jewelry that two Chilean Navy seamen absconded with after being assigned to guard a bank damaged during Chile’s great earthquake of 1960—continues to leave death in its wake as the action shifts from Antarctica to Chile. The goods are now in the hands of Cap. Roberto Muñoz, also of the Chilean Navy, who dispatches the previous owners in a grizzly but very neatly organized murder, detailed with significant brio by Cohen in the novel’s opening pages. Unfortunately for Muñoz, he has come under the suspicion of his old friend, Cap. Mateo Valderas, and his young sidekick in Internal Affairs, Lt.-Cmdr. Antonio Del Rio. Muñoz and Valderas had been at the naval academy together and knew each other’s minds fairly well, so the stage is set for a leisurely if menacing game of cat and mouse, with Muñoz staying a step ahead of the investigators while taunting Valderas with little clues in the form of rare and valuable coins (Valderas is a numismatics buff). Cohen keeps Valderas in hot pursuit, and there are moments when it appears that Muñoz might be too smart for his own good, but he never surrenders any hard evidence. The extended dialogues between Valderas and Del Rio occasionally lapse into a staged feeling, though they also work well in charting the connections between the dots. Where Cohen fully succeeds is in drawing the complexity of Muñoz’s character. The man is a thief and a murderer and a bully, and Cohen doesn’t let the reader forget that. Yet there is also decency lurking in his designs, and an appealing sense of honor, enough to spark moments of admiration, even as he sits on the beach in Ipanema, stealing looks at his “$50,000 Patek Philippe 18K yellow-gold Genève wrist watch.”
With Muñoz so fully drawn, it will be a pleasure to learn his fate.Pub Date: July 29, 2010
ISBN: 978-1452061788
Page Count: 252
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
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