Manera’s novel extrapolates the corrosive effects of big money in electoral politics and winds up with the assassination of a sitting U.S. president.
Former esteemed jurist and newly elected President Elizabeth Stone is riding high after winning the White House as an independent candidate and successfully pushing through a Constitutional amendment giving the chief executive the line item veto. Then, strolling along the beach with the Canadian prime minister, she and five Secret Service agents are mercilessly gunned down. Manera’s thinly veiled polemic against Washington, D.C.’s stagnant status quo starts out promisingly enough, as the authorities immediately set out to hunt down the heartless shooter. Early suspects briefly include the slain president’s historian hubby as well as her ambitious vice president. But before things get too interesting, the authorities have their man: Karl Schmidt, a vengeful small-time crook who happened to end up on the wrong side of Elizabeth Stone’s gavel when she was still on the bench. That Schmidt did the dirty deed is never in question, but George Baker, a dedicated FBI agent, believes somebody—or some persons—put him up to it. Enter the Company of Friends, a secretive Star Chamber–like institution bent on inflating their already piggish coffers by any means necessary. If that means offing the POTUS, then so be it. Readers already fed up with the influence of money in American democracy will sadly not find any of this too outlandish; that doesn’t mean they are likely to find it compelling, though. The narrative’s backward-facing plot relies too heavily on expository passages to explain events when it should be engaging in real action: “Liz realized that if she was going to dramatically reduce wasteful government spending, as she had promised during the campaign, she would need the authority to veto specific expenditures included in the annual budget passed by Congress.” Characters are similarly wooden and difficult to care about, while the foregone conclusion involving the Friends’ comeuppance is hardly revelatory.
A crime-of-the-century plot that, while making a good case for getting money out of politics, struggles to generate real drama.
Pub Date: May 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499647556
Page Count: 310
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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