A well-plotted and compelling tale, despite a few inaccuracies.
Kelsey offers a debut noir mystery featuring a memorable private detective seeking answers in 1949 Denver.
Harry Thorpe, a World War II veteran, is known to his friends as “Fuzzy,” plays bass fiddle at a jazz club, and has a fondness for bourbon. During the day, he works as a private eye, which mostly entails trailing unfaithful spouses. Although he finds this “depressing,” the pay is steady and the effort required is relatively minimal: “Snap some pics. Take some notes. Then help people ruin their lives.” When he’s asked to look into some threatening letters sent to his old Air Force colonel Christian Marquand, he balks at first; Marquand is cagey about the letters’ specific content and says that he burned them after reading them. Despite his misgivings, Thorpe finally accepts the case—and the hefty retainer that goes with it. He soon becomes entangled with other members of the Marquand family, getting to know the colonel’s wife, Louise, and falling for her darkly mysterious sister, Loren. But although the letters keep coming, Marquand continues to reveal little about them. Then Marquand’s young son is kidnapped, which ratchets up the stakes. What follows is a well-constructed narrative that gains momentum as the facts of the abduction—and the colonel’s shady connections—come to light. Some readers may be bothered by occasional anachronisms; Thorpe orders Macallan Scotch at a dive bar, even though single-malt Scotch whisky wasn’t available in the United States in 1949, and occasional 21st-century phrases such as “It’s all good” feel out of place. Kelsey proves to be a sharp storyteller, though, layering his narrative with suspense and romance and rounding out his characters with vivid traits and enough backstory to make them feel fully formed. In addition to being a sharp-tongued, hard-drinking detective, Thorpe is revealed to be a Princeton University graduate, a skilled researcher, and someone who’s suffered greatly from the trauma of war. Indeed, World War II and its atrocities loom over the entire novel.
A well-plotted and compelling tale, despite a few inaccuracies.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-578-85698-8
Page Count: 281
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.
A snap of the yo-yo string yanks Harry Bosch out of retirement yet again.
Los Angeles Councilman Jake Pearlman has resurrected the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit in order to reopen the case of his kid sister, Sarah, whose 1994 murder was instantly eclipsed in the press by the O.J. Simpson case when it broke a day later. Since not even a councilor can reconstitute a police unit for a single favored case, Det. Renée Ballard and her mostly volunteer (read: unpaid) crew are expected to reopen some other cold cases as well, giving Bosch a fresh opportunity to gather evidence against Finbar McShane, the crooked manager he’s convinced executed industrial contractor Stephen Gallagher, his wife, and their two children in 2013 and buried them in a single desert grave. The case has haunted Bosch more than any other he failed to close, and he’s fine to work the Pearlman homicide if it’ll give him another crack at McShane. As it turns out, the Pearlman case is considerably more interesting—partly because the break that leads the unit to a surprising new suspect turns out to be both fraught and misleading, partly because identifying the killer is only the beginning of Bosch’s problems. The windup of the Gallagher murders, a testament to sweating every detail and following every lead wherever it goes, is more heartfelt but less wily and dramatic. Fans of the aging detective who fear that he might be mellowing will be happy to hear that “putting him on a team did not make him a team player.”
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-48565-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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