An enjoyable legal thriller bolstered by a charmingly reliable champion of the innocent.
This second installment of a mystery series features a seasoned criminal defense attorney.
After his rousing debut, Good Lookin’(2021), San Francisco Bay Area defense lawyer–turned-author Bequette returns with a tale that sees Joe Turner rattled by a case introduced to him by old college flame Amanda Kensey. She wants him to represent a friend who’s become involved in a crime. A single father of two, Allston Walker is in jail on a $1 million bond for the attempted murder of Jefferson Devaney, a caretaker of the sketchy West Oakland Islander Hotel and the landlord the accused owed back rent to. Someone plunged a knife into Devaney’s chest. The victim insists that it was Walker who loomed over him and then fled. Turner gets to work on exonerating his new client, who insists he’s innocent. The attorney’s detective spadework proceeds with the scrutiny of video footage and interviews with a barrage of locals and witnesses. Turner finds the suspect list expanding along with the number of hotel tenants irate at Devaney for demanding rent. Devaney is no angel; he dispatched his nephew Denny daily to the horse racing track to place wagers for him, expecting lucrative results. What Turner imagines to be a relatively simple case turns out to rock the courtroom with high drama and surprise twists, a sex worker’s key testimony, and unexpected revelations. While attempting to rekindle a romantic fire with Amanda, Turner must deal with the recurrence of traumatic childhood flashbacks to when his veteran attorney father was murdered. Though Bequette’s debut was more sure-footed in plot, pacing, and case excitement, this sequel is a sturdy effort that fans of courtroom dramas will find entertaining, as it further solidifies Turner as a reliable sleuth and bighearted hero. The series is also consistently fortified by the author’s insider knowledge of how criminal minds work, how court cases are structured, the dynamics of police reports, and how innocent bystanders can get “caught up” in a crime scene. These details are often captivating and add legitimacy to the proceedings, further tethering readers to the unfolding mystery. There’s a gripping conclusion and some lively courtroom antics to keep readers on their toes as well, which lawyers will find especially intriguing.
An enjoyable legal thriller bolstered by a charmingly reliable champion of the innocent.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 327
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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