A lesser contribution to Griffin’s nonmilitary series but passable summer beach reading when there’s no reliable connection...
Griffin and his son, Butterworth (The Last Witness, 2013, etc.), offer No. 12 in their rich boy–turned–police officer series featuring .45-toting Matt Payne, Philadelphia’s homicide detective sergeant.
Payne, known to admirers as "Wyatt Earp of the Main Line," has been branded "Public Enemy Number One" by Josiah Cross, one-time crook–turned–storefront minister and $80,000-a-year chairman of Philadelphia’s Citizens Police Oversight Committee. Meanwhile, crime goes on, beginning with a smash-and-grab robbery at the Lucky Stars Casino. The mastermind was Tyrone Hooks, who’d rather be known as the rapper Rockin215. In the narrative-as-anecdote that follows, Hooks gets his comeuppance, since the casino’s major investor is Yuri Tikhonov, a former Russian SVR (that’s the new KGB) agent, who solves intractable business problems by murdering those who hurt the bottom line. There are also short histories of past Payne shootouts, with one former bad actor, the New Acuña Cartel, arriving via subplot with killers for hire who decapitate an investigative reporter working under Payne’s friend Mickey O’Hara. That gives O’Hara a chance to opine that "fewer people are willing to pay for publications that produce long-form journalism—the hard-hitting, in-depth pieces." In the cast of thousands, every player gets a description incorporating age—Cross is a "tall, skinny, bearded, 40-year-old African-American"—as Griffin pauses for multiple tangential expositions: comparing the stopping power of pistols to the horsepower of a Prius; a treatise on heroin, weed, and China- and Pakistan-manufactured synthetic drugs; and the massive frauds made possible by EB-5 visas and Cayman Islands secretive banking laws.
A lesser contribution to Griffin’s nonmilitary series but passable summer beach reading when there’s no reliable connection to Netflix.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-17117-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 31, 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
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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