An entertaining, richly imagined action yarn with intellectual bite.
A paramilitary do-gooder defends a Texas town from corporate skulduggery in this rollicking adventure tale.
This is the second novel in Bond’s Third Chance Enterprises series about a trio of private-eye security specialists. It’s a solo outing for Durwood Oak Jones, an ex-Marine contractor and West Virginia sorghum farmer with a sideline in righting injustices for people who respond to his ads in Soldier of Fortune magazine. One such letter comes from Chickasaw, Texas’ Democratic mayor, Carol Bridges, who thinks the Hogan Consolidated factory, a mainstay of the local economy, is being forced by lawsuits into a buyout that will result in mass layoffs. Nosing around corporate paperwork and court filings isn’t a typical project for Durwood, who usually solves problems with his fists, an M9 semiautomatic, and his arthritic hound dog, Sue-Ann. But Carol, an attractive, redheaded Iraq War vet who can quote Scripture, appeals to him, and the apparent villains—a 28-year-old CEO and some lawyers—are so loathsome that he feels compelled to get involved. The case leads to violence that gets Durwood framed for murder after he uncovers evidence of double-dealing (and a bit of BDSM); the case later takes a swerve that makes him question everything he thought he knew about the case. Bond’s tale features his usual lean, laconic, and evocative prose and mixes vivid character development (“He fared poorly when talking just to talk. Every useless word felt like some tiny roofing nail you’d spilled and had to go hunting through the grass for”) with gripping procedural and fight scenes (“Durwood punched his spine again. Harder….Holcomb, on his knees, was sinking like a slab of butter left out overnight”). It also has unobtrusive political themes, as Durwood feels himself a defender of honest capitalism against those who decry it and the “Wall Street sharks” who parasitize it. Eventually, however, he finds himself second-guessing his own heartland ethos; at one point, he muses that “The story had looked simple, black lines on white paper,” causing him to nurse “his own righteousness like the worst men of the age.” The result is an energetic page-turner with intriguing social commentary.
An entertaining, richly imagined action yarn with intellectual bite.Pub Date: April 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73225-529-6
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.
Stephanie Plum’s 31st adventure shows that Trenton’s preeminent fugitive-apprehension agent still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve, and needs every one of them.
The current caseload for Stephanie and Lula—the ex-prostitute file clerk at her cousin Vincent Plum’s bail bonds company, who serves as her unflappable sidekick—begins with two “failures to appear.” Eugene Fleck is suspected of being Robin Hoodie, who robs from the rich and, yes, distributes the proceeds to the poor. Racketeer Bruno Jug, who’s missed his court date on charges of tax evasion, is also suspected of drugging and raping a 14-year-old. But neither of these fugitives can hold a candle to Zoran Djordjevic, aka Fang, a self-proclaimed vampire wanted in connection with the gruesome fate of his late wife and three other missing women. As usual, Stephanie’s personal life is just as helter-skelter as her professional life as a bounty hunter. She’s managed to get herself engaged both to Det. Joe Morelli, of the Trenton PD, and Ranger, a former Special Forces agent who runs a private security firm; she thinks she may be pregnant; and she’s willing to marry the father, whichever of her fiances that turns out to be. On top of it all, her nothingburger schoolmate Herbert Slovinski suddenly pops up at one of the funerals she ferries her Grandma Mazur to, hitting on her relentlessly and gilding his importunities by cleaning and painting her shabby apartment and laying new carpet. Luckily, Lula’s on hand to offer cupcakes that stave off the worst disasters, and whenever this hodgepodge threatens to slow down, another FTA appears, or fails to appear.
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781668003138
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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
© 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.
