The technical snags are defeated by two vicious criminal minds.
There’s no sophomore slump for Tanz as he brings his Philly style back to this cat-and-mouse crime story that weaves together the lives of two serial killers.
Bruce Titell is a classic computer geek: His life revolves around computing power, processors and software updates. His wife, thinly fleshed-out Julie Donovan, has repaid his lack of interest in their marriage with multiple affairs, all procured from online “cheaters” websites. After her shocking death in a car crash, Titell takes his deep-seated rage and fuels it into a revenge plot that ultimately involves murdering women who stray. Tanz crosses his story with that of mob hit man Julian Gando, a Philadelphia transplant whose life revolves around killing and his former-call-girl live-in love, Bryant Merril. Bruce and Julian are both being watched by the city’s top-notch Organized Crime Task Force, whose undercover cops and computer code crackers doggedly pursue the blood-soaked criminals. Tanz creates a wickedly twisted world, although Titell’s transformation from upstanding businessman to crazed murderer is a bit rushed. Yet it’s hard to put the book down because Titell and Gando pursue their crimes in such a heartless, detailed fashion. Spelling errors and strange details, such as what every character eats or drinks, tend to slow down the story, and Tanz sometimes bogs down the flow with updates on when Titell decides to go shopping or head to bed. Fortunately, there’s plenty of intrigue to make up for these minor storytelling deficiencies. In particular, Titell’s use of cheater websites and his ability to morph into his killer character—“SmoothAssSilk”—provide fascinating chapters, pulling the character’s madness into disturbingly realistic depths: “He pushed back from the desk, took a long sip of whiskey and turned on the computer. After loading, he clicked on Favorites and entered the site. He smiled broadly when he noticed two replies and four flirts adorning his inbox.” It’s chilling to watch the two men descend from their everyday lives into complete darkness.
The technical snags are defeated by two vicious criminal minds.Pub Date: July 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-1477431016
Page Count: 234
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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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