Although this second outing relies too heavily on its predecessor (Blood’s Echo, 2017) and Maldonado spends too much time...
An ex-narc leads a war against a powerful crime family.
Veranda Cruise is supposed to meet an informant in her hunt against the Villalobos drug cartel. But after the informant goes up in flames and the hit man who killed him escapes, she’s left with nothing except her hatred of the clan that’s tried to destroy her family. After spending more than two years investigating the cartel, along with its biggest rival, Veranda was recently ousted from Phoenix’s Drug Enforcement Bureau and, after her name was cleared, transferred to Homicide only six weeks ago. So she’s very surprised when she’s appointed the lead detective in a multiagency task force called Operation Scorpion Sting. It’s a great honor, but it also means that if she fails, she’ll take several people down with her—and she’ll be even more of a target of the Villalobos clan than she already is. Adolfo Villalobos, the heir apparent of the crime family, must also prove himself worthy. Knowing that his ruthless father, El Lobo, has as much reason to hate Veranda as she does him, Adolfo has hired a computer hacker who helps him track Veranda’s every move, especially her bold plan to shut down both the Villalobos operation and the rival cartel. Scorpion partially succeeds by putting the other crime family out of business, but El Lobo and all his operatives elude them. The Villalobos cartel now rules Phoenix, and it’s all on Veranda. Her supervisors keep her in place, but before she has a chance to form a new plan—and after many, many pages of flashbacks and back story—she comes face to face with El Lobo’s chief enforcer and a brilliant plan to discredit her. It nearly succeeds, except for help from an unexpected source and Veranda’s own determination to show what she’s really made of.
Although this second outing relies too heavily on its predecessor (Blood’s Echo, 2017) and Maldonado spends too much time setting up its plot, the payoff, when it finally comes, is satisfying.Pub Date: March 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7387-5102-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Midnight Ink/Llewellyn
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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