A terrific, fast-paced addition to a satisfying thriller series featuring a winning, unconventional cast.
A murder mystery explores the shady world of offshore gambling.
This fourth installment of a series finds Farrell’s main characters, part-time private investigator Eddie O’Connell and his Uncle Mike, once again caught up in horse racing, bookmaking, and the mob. Mike, a retired cop, is the owner of O’Connell’s Tavern in Chicago, where Eddie acts as bar manager. As the novel opens, Eddie’s girlfriend, Nicole Nicoletti, gets a surprise visit from Jessie Rivera, who’s part of a “power couple” in Chicago horse racing. Jessie’s partner is Sal, Nicole’s horse trainer father, who is accused of doping his steeds. He maintains he’s being framed, but nevertheless, he faces a serious suspension. The mere hint of the crime initially chills Eddie’s sympathies, since he has grown up around the racing world and hates the idea of drugging horses. “I’d heard of other trainers being suspended for juicing, and all I had to say was ‘good riddance,’ ” he thinks. “Horses had suffered, and some had died during a race.” Eddie and Nicole begin to investigate Sal’s situation, which gets much darker almost immediately when Jessie is found shot dead. Eddie, Nicole, and Mike naturally suspect Jessie’s brother, Ramon, fresh from a stint in prison for drug running for a major cartel (“A proud man,” an exercise rider describes him. “And a proud man is the worst kind of man”). The murder also draws the attention of the local mob boss Rosario Burrascano (“If you’re the mob’s gambling boss and a murder occurs at the last race track in town,” Mike says, “you get a handle on it”). The heroes are soon neck-deep in a complex web of conflicting motives.
As in the previous volumes in this thriller series, Farrell once again strikes the perfect pace for this tangle of narrative threads. He dispenses with the usual exposition baggage that dogs later books in an ongoing series by gradually and subtly working background and context into the dialogue, which makes up by far the largest part of the novel. Readers see everything through Eddie’s eyes, and since he’s once again the least developed of the story’s characters, the effect is very close to impersonal narration. He’s convincingly emotional about the turmoil Nicole is going through, and when the strain of her father’s scandal and Jessie’s murder starts to fray the edges of her relationship with Eddie, the interpersonal stuff feels real. Farrell is adept at continuously complicating his narrative without leaving his readers behind; it’s a good bet that even newcomers to the series could start with this volume and get along just fine. And as usual, Mike steals the show, always both the voice of experience and the fountain of rough humor. “Uncle Mike had worked murder cases that could pull the heartstrings to the breaking point, yet he was still able to maintain his sense of humor,” Eddie marvels at one point. “His skin was thicker than cowhide.” The heroes’ bleak sentiments fill the gripping book’s darker second half. “We lived in a world where fentanyl could be cooked up in a kitchen in Mexico by first year chemistry students,” Eddie thinks at one point. “Chasing new drugs was like playing whack-a-mole.”
A terrific, fast-paced addition to a satisfying thriller series featuring a winning, unconventional cast.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2025
ISBN: 9781736593264
Page Count: 294
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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