A tension-fueled mystery with plenty of twists and two appealing sleuths.
In this detective series opener, a 27-year-old accountant becomes the target of a murderous cadre when he accepts a new assignment that takes him from Los Angeles to the East Coast center of power.
Thaddeus Hanlon, a former professional surfer who is a forensic accountant with a top CPA firm, Dodge Whitney; his wife, Marrisa; and close friend Abril “Bri” de la Guerra are enjoying a luxe annual corporate celebration. They are awaiting the return of Rafael “Rafi” Silva, Bri’s fiance and Thad’s best buddy, from Washington, D.C., where he has been working on a special project for Dodge Whitney. Instead, they receive a devastating phone call from Jenny Yu, Rafi’s Washington audit associate. It turns out that Rafi is dead. The police declare his death a suicide but Bri insists he has been murdered (“I know he didn’t kill himself…Rafi would never do that to me”). The next day, Thad is offered Rafi’s job, running an undercover audit of the country’s gold bullion reserve for the Treasury Department’s “Second Gold Commission” at a time when there is political interest in returning to the Gold Standard. The job requires him and six-months-pregnant Marrisa to move to the nation’s capital. It is a career-changing opportunity and a chance to investigate Rafi’s death with Bri. With Thad and Marrisa comfortably settled in a luxurious Georgetown brownstone, the accountant heads to the special project’s base of operations, the multilayered, secure Treasury Liberty Central building. Thad is ready to complete Rafi’s assignment—if he can decipher his buddy’s encrypted notes. Jones’ action-packed murder mystery—complete with two engaging amateur detectives, violent assaults, high-speed car chases through Washington, and an occasionally confusing plethora of bad guys—also serves as a primer on the history of America’s Gold Standard backing of the nation’s currency. Thad’s audit visit to the gold vault, 80 feet below ground at the Federal Reserve Bank in Lower Manhattan, raises the intriguing possibility of fake bricks mingled in with the legitimate bullion and takes readers through the metal-testing process. Woven into the gripping plot are sensual, detailed descriptions of Thad’s adventures riding the waves, which should please the surfer crowd and afford others a visceral sense of the experience.
A tension-fueled mystery with plenty of twists and two appealing sleuths.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781509251681
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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