A delightfully eccentric detective story despite occasional structural distractions.
A disgraced cop with a rare mental disorder is investigated by the police and hunted by the mob in Thomas’ first installment of a mystery series.
Raymond Mackey’s life is anything but enviable—he was forced out of the Chandler Police Department in Illinois when evidence surfaced that he was connected to Cosmo Green, an associate of José Beggamon, who was a shadowy mob boss generally known as Big Man. Now Mack works as a part-time security guard at a local mall while writing detective thrillers at home. He also suffers from a rare disorder—depersonalization-derealization disorder, or what he calls “Triple-D.” This affliction, which is intelligently described by Thomas, compels Mack to see himself in the third person, as if he’s a character in a movie. Although he’s been off the force for more than four years, Mack finds himself yet again at the center of an investigation: The police are eager to find Suri, his old informant, who may have mob ties. When Mack conducts his own investigation, he realizes Suri’s life is in terrible danger—the result of a murky past that was neither clarified nor resolved in any satisfying way. This is a quirky and refreshingly thoughtful detective story that astutely highlights the common ground shared by investigative work and the labor of writing fiction: “Crime fighters have an instinct for bullshit. Crime writers do too. They know when they’ve written a character off the edge of the cliff of plausibility, so that he just kind of hangs there, Wily-E-Coyote [sic] style, grabbing at thin air as the reader rolls their eyes.” Although the plot can become a dense jumble of entangled subplots—there are simply too many side angles and too many literary feints—this is still a captivating tale, grippingly peculiar and dramatically immersive.
A delightfully eccentric detective story despite occasional structural distractions.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1734630350
Page Count: 250
Publisher: OTF Literary
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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