An intriguing mystery, although some elements strain credulity.
A hit man trying to hide his past gets entangled with people with similarly violent backstories in Thorson’s debut thriller.
A government contract killer, intent on starting a new life, finds an alias among authors’ names in a South Dakota bookstore: Malcolm Winters. He orders corresponding fake identification from a Nashville-based forger known as “Freddy Four-Fingers.” In the Music City, Mal is nursing his third drink at a bluegrass dive when a woman named Fyre Stockton,whom he sees as “every man’s fantasy,”sits next to him. The two share small talk before she announces she has to leave. The next morning, he runs into her at his hotel, and soon they’re in her room, “crashing down upon the mattress.” After they part ways, Mal decides to head to Chicago, where Fyre said she lives. Oddly, once there, he waits over a month to call her, but he’s been busy: He bought a three-apartment building and conned the University of Illinois at Chicago into hiring him as a visiting English professor. He begins seriously dating Fyre but also forms a close relationship with fellow faculty member Vinn. Fyre and Vinn both have a penchant for danger and secrecy, just as Mal does. Then a shocking murder propels Malcolm into a century-old mystery—one that needs to be solved to prevent more killing. Large sections of the book move quickly, as when Mal tails Fyre from her apartment to a deserted building where danger lurks. However, portions involving Mal’s tenant, who suffers from dissociative identity disorder, border on caricature. Mal’s haughty critiques of others are also overdone, be they heavier than him, middle-aged, or cat lovers. Thorson, who lives just outside Chicago, describes the city and its neighborhoods beautifully. However, it seems naïve to suggest that UIC would hire a professor without a background check. It’s also unrealistic that Mal would outfit his kitchen with “a selection of knives, knuckles, canisters of mace, and one wicked, spiked cross between a hammer and a club,” engineered to drop down from the ceiling whenever he yells the word tequila.
An intriguing mystery, although some elements strain credulity.Pub Date: May 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64750-319-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Austin Macauley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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