A lean but captivating detective novel.
In Tucher’s crime novel, a young cop tackles a particularly Hawaiian murder.
Officer Jenny Freitas is a cop on Hawaii’s Big Island, where her duties include everything from investigating homicides to conducting routine wellness checks. Sometimes, a call turns out to be both, as when she goes to check on the elderly Langston Otsaka only to find him dead at the bottom of the lava tube that recently opened up on his property. The problem, in this case, is that the man seems to have been dead before he went into the hole. What reason would someone have to murder old Langston Otsaka? A rumor quickly spreads that the senior citizen had a cache of money hidden somewhere on his property, perhaps in the very lava tube where his body was found. There are also whispers that someone has been desecrating sites associated with the island’s “old kine religion”; Pele, the goddess of fire, is known to open up pyroducts when she’s displeased, but Jenny suspects a more human cause behind this foul play. Is there something to this story of hidden money, or did Langston’s killer have a more personal problem with the old man? Tucher’s prose is spare but efficient, capturing the essence of his characters through sharp dialogue and concise descriptions. Though she may seem like a stereotypical tough cop, Jenny is softened by her almost childlike desire to reach the rank of detective, as seen here when her mentor, Detective Coutinho, serves her coffee: “He placed a cup of coffee in front of her on his partner’s desk. No milk, no sugar, when she would have preferred both, but if that was how detectives took it, she would learn to like it.” The Hawaiian setting, which takes care to differentiate between the many subdivisions and regional identities of island society, is immersive. By the end, readers will be eagerly awaiting their next island sojourn with Officer Freitas.
A lean but captivating detective novel.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781956957785
Page Count: 152
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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
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