An entertaining and sometimes-poignant work of detective fiction.
An ex-cop–turned-pastor must use his investigative skills to figure out what happened to a missing clergyman in Gresham’s latest series mystery.
When Matt Hayden, an elderly pastor on medical leave after getting shot in the previous series installment,attends the inauguration of his best friend’s son, Jimmy Novak, as the governor of Texas, he doesn’t expect to give the benediction. He fills in for David Duff, another pastor, who doesn’t show up. Matt stays for a celebratory barbecue, and afterward, he’s ambushed by reporters, and all the excitement causes the ill pastor to pass out. After awakening in a hospital, Matt is advised to stay in Austin; his best friend, James W. Novak, arranges for him to stay in the home of Hester Honeywell, who previously hosted Duff and Duff’s assistant, Pastor Greg Lambert. When Duff is finally declared a missing person, Matt joins the investigation. At the same time, he tries to respect his own physical limitations and work on his relationship with his fiancee, bar owner Angie O’Day. Gresham, who also wrote Murder in the Second Pew (2017), returns with another compelling mystery. From the start, the author will draw readers in with his uniquely cautious protagonist—a rare fictional detective who tries to avoid excitement and distress due to the possibility that they might raise his blood pressure. He also necessarily uses a cane to get around despite the fact he’s never happy to be reminded to use it. Most readers wouldn’t expect someone so fragile to be working a missing person case, but the author makes it feel plausible by putting Matt in just the right place at the right time. Matt also intriguingly works to figure out Angie’s feelings for him; since his injury, she’s been more of a caretaker than a lover. Overall, it’s an engaging tale, told at an appealing pace, despite its lack of closure at the end.
An entertaining and sometimes-poignant work of detective fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 360
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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