An appealing detective tale that may spark readers’ interest in the sleuth’s previous adventures.
In the fourth installment of a mystery series, a Florida private eye investigates a murder and the disappearances surrounding a Daytona Beach gentlemen’s club.
Near the end of the summer in 1986, Jake Bodine makes his way to where police have discovered a body. The private investigator’s client is Buck Pendleton, who’s worried that the dead woman is one of the missing performers from his club, Fantasy on the Beach. Sadly, Jake confirms that the victim is Joyce Davenport; in the last two weeks, she, Lucy Clay, and Vanessa Baker vanished. Jake’s job for Pendleton also includes tracking down the other women and identifying Joyce’s killer, but quietly, so as to avoid bad publicity for Fantasy. Jake and his investigative partner, Jorge Hernandez, question club staff and other performers but quickly meet resistance. A thug assaults Jake in the Fantasy parking lot, and, in another incident, someone flattens his car’s tires. The PI learns he has a powerful enemy—a man who frequents a notoriously dangerous nightclub. The reason he’s targeted Jake may have a connection to the murder as well as the missing performers. Before the case is over, Jake will have another death to look into and a few suspects he can hopefully tie to the crimes. The ’80s setting in Dempsey’s deliberately paced novel spawns delightful, old-school techniques. For example, at one point, Jake and others trail a suspect in separate cars without the benefit of GPS tracking. The recurring detective is dynamic, both tough and vulnerable, having lost his fiancee less than a year ago. But his romances aren’t convincing, particularly since he dates three women in a mere three weeks—some of those overlapping. Meanwhile, much of the mystery is resolved in the narrative’s first half. But menaces persist throughout, and Jake displays tenacity in continuing the investigation, hoping to see the killers punished.
An appealing detective tale that may spark readers’ interest in the sleuth’s previous adventures. (acknowledgements, author bio, "An Important Final Word")Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-70999-127-1
Page Count: 415
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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