The windup’s not as compelling as the excruciatingly calibrated buildup, but most readers will be glad the nightmare is over.
Miami lawyer Jack Swyteck and his wife, FBI agent Andie Henning, get caught in the crossfire of a mass shooting at their daughter’s exclusive school.
Violence erupts at the Riverside Day School shortly after Andie drops off their 5-year-old daughter, Righley. Since it’s too late for her to retrieve her service weapon from her glove compartment, she grabs a fire extinguisher and runs toward the sound of the shots, hoping she can disarm the shooter or save some of the children. By the time the police take Riverside senior Xavier Khoury into custody, the death toll stands at 13; Xavier has already confessed that he pulled the trigger; and al-Qaida is about to claim responsibility. The privileged parents of the slain children close ranks against the boy, whose mother, Andie’s friend Molly, they see as one of their kind but whose father, wealthy private equity banker Amir Khoury, is Muslim and therefore, to the other parents, this close to being an avowed terrorist. Despite his best efforts to avoid it, Jack ends up defending Xavier, who won’t say a word to him or anyone else. Jack's modest goal—consecutive life sentences instead of the death penalty—is nixed by prosecutor Abe Beckham, who smells an obvious win-win; Andie is sued by the school for conduct it claims increased the danger to the students instead of curtailing it; and both Jack and Andie, whose long-standing promise to each other prevents them from sharing everything they know about the case, realize belatedly that they’ve run afoul of a vast network of secretive government agencies that won’t make you proud to be an American.
The windup’s not as compelling as the excruciatingly calibrated buildup, but most readers will be glad the nightmare is over.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-291508-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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