Though sometimes over-the-top, a treat for those who would love a Roman holiday.
The second installment in Downie’s thriller series features the famous catacombs of Rome.
During a gala performance at the Institute of America in Rome, a shot rings out and panicked figures in white tunics flee the catacombs under that institution’s grounds. The beautiful and resourceful Maj. Daria Vinci of DIGOS (think FBI), attending the gala, is immediately on the case. The dead man is Charles Wraithwhite, a charismatic fellow who was hired to write a postwar history of the institute in order to improve its shopworn image. Was this a suicide, an unfortunate outcome of Russian roulette, or something worse? Charles was not all that he seemed. Was he a threat to somebody? What about the longtime president of the institute—the slightly ghoulish, gaunt, and handsy Taylor Chatwin-Paine? Almost immediately, Daria’s well-fed sidekick, Capt Osvaldo Morbido, guesses that powerful people are obfuscating facts and pulling strings. Sure enough, he is ordered to return to Genoa, and Daria gets a surprise promotion and transfer to Venice, effective immediately. Will Daria attempt to solve the case from afar? Downie speaks Italian fluently and spent many years in Rome, and he clearly loves the city and the culture. This follow-up to Red Riviera (2021), the first in Downie's Daria Vinci Investigation series, abounds with quirky, memorable characters. In fact, the book is so overstuffed, the reader often feels at sea. And some trappings, though not red herrings, seem overdone and indulgent. Bags of jelly beans along with toy gladiator swords are hidden about, sending cryptic messages to those who can decipher them. One thinks of kids at summer camp concocting elaborate, esoteric stories to entertain themselves after they have tired of drawing treasure maps. But one does get a wonderfully detailed tour of Rome from someone who clearly loves it: “Eternal, the city was, a crazy, suffocating, miasmic, endearing enigmatic mess.” It is also, in Downie’s telling, a city that thrives on intrigue.
Though sometimes over-the-top, a treat for those who would love a Roman holiday.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-942892-32-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Alan Squire Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.
Unbeknownst to each other, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett and outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski embark on equally urgent pursuits that converge in a way neither of them suspects.
Nate, who’s been off the grid ever since his wife, Liv, was killed in a fire intended to kill him too in Three-Inch Teeth (2024), has sworn vengeance on murderous conspirator Axel Soledad. After shooting several of Soledad’s hirelings, he joins forces with his friend and fellow Special Forces vet Geronimo Jones, who’s tracked him down, to chase his quarry deep into the woods. Governor Spencer Rulon, meanwhile, has pressed Joe into service once again to find veteran hunting guide Spike Rankin and his new assistant, Mark Eisele, who just happens to be Rulon’s son-in-law. Although nobody’s heard from the men for two days, the governor doesn’t want his wife and daughter to know they’re missing, and that means not alerting the media or the local sheriff, who’s no fan of Rulon’s anyway. Readers who’ve already seen Rankin and Eisele overpowered and imprisoned by a mysterious crew they ran into while they were setting up for the elk hunting season will assume that Soledad is behind their kidnapping as well. But Box will keep everyone guessing about exactly how Soledad and the ragtag military cult he’s gathered around him plan to confront the military-industrial complex he’s persuaded them is a clear and present danger. You know you’re in for a wild ride when Joe, saying goodbye to Marybeth, his long-suffering wife, promises her, “I’ll do my job and not cross the line.”
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851050
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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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