A solid crime story with an evocative sense of place.
An unspeakably brutal contemporary murder has roots in the 1950s.
Sheriff Porter Beck, whose jurisdiction is sparsely populated Lincoln County, north of Las Vegas, is called to the scene of a singularly savage crime. Retired FBI agent Ralph Atterbury has been bound to the recliner in his home and systematically tortured. Beck and his team have barely begun their investigation when the FBI storms in, in the person of stylish, no-nonsense Special Agent Sana Locke. Interspersed flashbacks take the story to 1955, when destined lovers Freddie Meyer and Kitty Ellison meet at the newly opened Dunes Hotel and Casino, where they both work. Through a family friend, Kitty helps Freddie get a job at the nearby atomic testing site. The more elaborate third-person prose of these chapters plays nicely against Beck’s more direct first-person narrative. Borgos’ debut is solidly anchored in the lively banter between Beck and Locke, who soon give in to their sexual chemistry. More deaths add urgency to the investigation. The 1950s plot, which centers around nuclear testing and the mysterious Project 57, thickens when the ingenuous Freddie is introduced to Georgiy, a Russian whose malevolence will be instantly apparent to everyone but him. This plotline, though interesting, is more successful as history than mystery. Along the way, this series kickoff introduces Beck’s elderly dad and his team of deputies, Wardell, Pete, and Tuffy, the latter of whom proves the most valuable of the three. A clever plot twist gives the third act a welcome infusion of energy.
A solid crime story with an evocative sense of place.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781250848079
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.
A snap of the yo-yo string yanks Harry Bosch out of retirement yet again.
Los Angeles Councilman Jake Pearlman has resurrected the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit in order to reopen the case of his kid sister, Sarah, whose 1994 murder was instantly eclipsed in the press by the O.J. Simpson case when it broke a day later. Since not even a councilor can reconstitute a police unit for a single favored case, Det. Renée Ballard and her mostly volunteer (read: unpaid) crew are expected to reopen some other cold cases as well, giving Bosch a fresh opportunity to gather evidence against Finbar McShane, the crooked manager he’s convinced executed industrial contractor Stephen Gallagher, his wife, and their two children in 2013 and buried them in a single desert grave. The case has haunted Bosch more than any other he failed to close, and he’s fine to work the Pearlman homicide if it’ll give him another crack at McShane. As it turns out, the Pearlman case is considerably more interesting—partly because the break that leads the unit to a surprising new suspect turns out to be both fraught and misleading, partly because identifying the killer is only the beginning of Bosch’s problems. The windup of the Gallagher murders, a testament to sweating every detail and following every lead wherever it goes, is more heartfelt but less wily and dramatic. Fans of the aging detective who fear that he might be mellowing will be happy to hear that “putting him on a team did not make him a team player.”
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-48565-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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