Mark’s fourth (Sorrow Bound, 2014, etc.) is a dark, bloody, twisting tale of love, hate, and greed you can’t put down.
The Serious and Organized Crime Unit battles a vast criminal organization.
Everyone in Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh’s meeting in London is abuzz over the Headhunters, which aims to take control of all criminal activities now being led by smaller regional groups. So far they’ve succeeded in making offers no crime boss could refuse—and any who did refuse died horrible deaths. But the Headhunters haven’t been able to convince 81-year-old Francis Nock and his enforcer, Raymond Mahon, who’ve run a criminal enterprise in the Hull area since before most of the upstarts were born. Pharaoh is most concerned about the welfare of her friend DS Aector McAvoy, who’s living in a small room with his son. His wife, Roisin, and their baby daughter have been hidden away ever since their house was blown up and Aector was attacked and left for dead by someone with a major grudge, perhaps an angry drug dealer. At the conference, Pharaoh is approached by a woman from the Home Office who insists she get McAvoy, still on sick leave and lost without Roisin, to take a job investigating a multiple murder case from 50 years earlier. Originally declared insane, the presumed killer is now considered fit for trial, and McAvoy is supposed to look into the case and see if there’s enough evidence to go ahead. Hardworking and honest, McAvoy is still widely hated by some of his fellow police officers for bringing down a crooked but popular copper. He soon learns that not only has much of the decades-old evidence vanished, but there’s a chance someone else committed the crime. As the Headhunters fight for dominance with help from crooked cops, Pharaoh and McAvoy discover almost too late that their cases are intertwined and more than one villain is eager to see them both dead.
Mark’s fourth (Sorrow Bound, 2014, etc.) is a dark, bloody, twisting tale of love, hate, and greed you can’t put down.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-16821-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
