Dark and juicy, the middle entry in Sáenz’s epic trilogy immerses readers in a vibrant, dangerous city.
A righteous police inspector is propelled into examining his past while facing personal and professional challenges in the present.
In the Spanish city of Vitoria, Inspector Unai López de Ayala, known as Kraken, gets a double whammy from his lover and boss, Deputy Superintendent Alba Díaz de Salvatierra: She’s pregnant, and the father might not be him but her dead husband, Nancho, a serial killer. His pursuit of Nancho in The Silence of the White City (2020) left Kraken with serious head injuries that have impaired his ability to speak. Though he narrates in a gritty first person, he regularly visits a speech therapist and rarely talks to others, preferring to conduct conversations in the texts peppered throughout. A message from Kraken’s partner, Estíbaliz, brings more bad news: Kraken’s first girlfriend, graphic novelist Ana Belén Liaño, has been murdered. Intermittent flashbacks to 1992 present their idyllic teen romance and provide an intriguing counterpoint to the main noir narrative. Sáenz’s large, boldly painted canvas includes a plague of inexplicable suicides by young women. Kraken’s collaboration with his own group of colorful irregulars—hacker extraordinaire Golden Girl; Tasio Ortiz de Zárate, long imprisoned as a serial killer but exonerated; street-wise skater MatuSalem; and others—is this story’s most enjoyable feature. The murder of one of Kraken’s old friends indicates both that he’s dealing with a serial killer and that he might be the killer’s focus.
Dark and juicy, the middle entry in Sáenz’s epic trilogy immerses readers in a vibrant, dangerous city.Pub Date: March 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-9848-9861-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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