The ideal audience for this shaggy trip down Memory Lane: die-hard fans who wish rock could go on forever.
Junior Bender, who “steal[s] from the rich and sell[s] to the richer,” falls into a rabbit hole full of aging rock-and-roll bands.
Irwin Dressler is unhappy. Rock of Ages, the ancient foursome to whom he loaned $250,000 to finance a nostalgia tour, hasn’t returned a penny, and there are rumors that they’ve lost a more substantial amount of money than he ever would’ve expected them to take in. Most creditors would have to suffer this mistreatment in silence, but since Dressler’s still the preeminent gang leader in Los Angeles despite his constant fears that he’ll lose face and everything else, he gets Junior to look into the matter for him. That’s why Junior’s on hand when drummer Boomboom Black ends his performance at Wilshire’s Lafayette Theater with the band Rat Bite by getting into a fight with the lead guitarist, who conks him with his instrument, and then getting a much more consequential conk from a falling stage flat that ends both his set and his life. It’s kind of awkward for Junior, who’s not only there on what he assumes is unrelated business, but is accompanied by Rina, his teenage daughter, whose mother has entrusted her to her ex while she’s out of town. The best parts of this blast from the past involve the relations among Rina, Junior as the world’s worst babysitter, and Lavender, an aging groupie to whom Rina takes a shine. Other characters from the Razorettes, Lionel and the Pussycats, and Rock of Ages dissolve under a haze of bright lights that overshadow the forgettable mystery and cast readers as semistoned groupies themselves.
The ideal audience for this shaggy trip down Memory Lane: die-hard fans who wish rock could go on forever.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64129-218-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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