A smart, gripping crime thriller about the corrosive price of vengeance.
A former gambler teams up with a former police detective to investigate the fate of a missing mob enforcer in Farrell’s mystery novel.
Arlene Adams, the owner of Chicago’s Thornton Racetrack, calls in private investigator and sports gambler Eddie O’Connell and his uncle, Mike, a retired police detective. Arlene thinks the duo might be perfectly placed to help with a peculiar problem: She’s been having bad dreams about the missing love of her life (and, unbeknownst to her, a professional mob hit man), Porter “the Pastor” Pearson, in which he seems to repeatedly ask her (his words are unclear), “Why aren’t you looking for me, Arlene?” Eddie is skeptical at first, but Arlene has been contacted by Pearson’s old fellow hitman, the Deacon, and Uncle Mike is enticed by all the cold cases he could help to close. Meeting with the Deacon sets in motion a twisty plot involving said cold cases, an unexpected new murder, and the lurking dangers of the high-rolling world of gambling and its connections to crime. With the help of Eddie’s former girlfriend, Nicole, now a famous professional poker player in Las Vegas, Eddie and Mike soon make connections to the power structure undergirding the world of shady finance, where they meet “hedge fund celebrity” Eliot Scullion. Conducting a tense investigation in which any one of their new acquaintances could be a murderer, Eddie and Uncle Mike must be careful not to become victims themselves.
Much like the previous outings in this series, Farrell’s foray into the interconnected worlds of gambling and organized crime yields a story full of narrative crackle and well-drawn characters, here enhanced by the added element of Wall Street “masters of the universe” (plus a few criminal Russians as a bonus). The author’s skill at pacing is superb, without any lulls or dead-end subplots, and his ear for characterization is so keen that huge swaths of the book are carried by dialogue alone. Eddie and Uncle Mike naturally occupy the spotlight, but secondary characters like Nicole (and even Arlene Adams) are handled with textured believability (including the Deacon, for whom readers will feel sympathy but no affection). The interplay between Uncle Mike’s world of law enforcement and the series’ recurring mob family, the Burrascanos, is handled with pleasing nuance, especially in this latest installment, in which Uncle Mike’s long and ethically spotty history with both the Deacon and one of his victims is gradually laid bare to Eddie. These revelations reopen Eddie’s oldest and most painful family wounds, and Farrell steadfastly resists the temptation to sink into cheap melodrama. The book takes some confident and intensely satisfying swings at maturing Eddie without fundamentally altering the great chemistry between the two heroes, and the element of personal redemption (working in the bright lights of Vegas, Eddie feels anew the pull of the gambling world he’s left behind for respectability) adds some light to the plot’s many dark elements. As with the earlier books in this series, this latest will leave readers eager for another outing.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781736593240
Page Count: 346
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
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