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
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
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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