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
BOOK REVIEW
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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