Formulaic but great good fun for genre fans.
Mainline Philadelphia homicide detective Matt Payne battles mobsters in Griffin’s (The Vigilantes, 2010, etc.) latest book in his Badge of Honor series.
Krystal Gonzalez takes two to the head in the Society Hill townhouse of Maggie McMain. McCain’s missing, but she’s not a suspect. It’s feared the culprit who murdered Gonzalez has kidnapped or killed McCain. McCain, who runs Mary’s House, a shelter for foster children, is the daughter of a Philadelphia mover and shaker, and Gonzalez, once a client of Mary’s House, may have become entangled in the tentacles of the Los Zetas Mexican drug cartel. Authorities know too that elements of the Russian mob, busy worming its way into Philadelphia politics via payoffs from Cayman Island bank accounts, are allying with the cartel. Griffin offers the usual good guys of movie-star proportions—"six feet tall, a lithely muscled 170 pounds...thick dark hair...neat and short." Nearly everyone on the side of the angels is wealthy or connected to wealth or to each other. There are down-to-the-bullets-in-the-magazine descriptions of weapons—the trusty Colt .45 1911A is a favorite—as well as techno-gear from throwaway cellphones to anonymous email servers. Griffin serves up enough exposition about geographical locales and amenities, exotic and prosaic, to provide useful travel guides. Much of the narrative could be a CliffNotes synopsis of the corruption of legitimate processes—EB-5 visas for moneyed immigrants, international banking, capital investment funds—by drug and prostitution profits. Rich immigrants and drug lords manipulate; naive girls and runaway teens end up dead and disappeared into El Pozolero’s bath of sodium hydroxide lye beads; and McCain goes to ground in a posh Virgin Islands resort. All but the last few chapters are a setup for the quick but open-ended conclusion, where Payne lets bullets fly and bad guys die.
Formulaic but great good fun for genre fans.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-16257-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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