Timely and tense; a worthy addition to a thriller series.
An undercover federal agent investigates a police officer’s brutal hit-and-run death: Could it have been a planned attack by a member of the force?
In this fifth installment of Barrows’ thriller series, agent David Ward of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is on a Colorado ski trip with his significant other, Rowan Parks. But then his boss asks him to slip into a Florida police force that might have one or more extremely bad apples. One of them could have been driving the pick-up truck that mowed down Deputy Jackson Garrett as he stood issuing a speeding ticket on a rural Panhandle road. Tallahassee Sheriff Eli Coe “thinks his office has been infiltrated by the Oath Keepers and the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association.” One or more officers engaged in such a group might have had it in for Garrett. Ward’s undercover name is Samuel Audie Hill. As he’s brought in as part of the SWAT unit, he alters his appearance to “a more SWAT-like look,” which includes a buzz cut and a shaved-off beard. (When he texts a photograph of his new style to Rowan, she responds, “I love you, anyway?”)Ward learns quickly that some of his fellow officers have strong feelings against Florida Gov. Thomas Fuller because he favors “reasonable restrictions on assault weapons,” promoted mask-wearing during the Covid-19 pandemic, and “stole” the primary election from fellow candidate and “true conservative” state Sen. Bryce Collins. Mirroring the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, a coup may be in the offing. The timeliness of the story is a plus, though readers’ appreciation may vary according to their political views. The pacing is brisk; the writing is crisp (“The handshake was not a contest, but a greeting”) and the details are often amusing: “Ward was struck by the shark mounted above the bed.” Ward is a most likable protagonist and the other characters are realistic, but there are so many lieutenants, deputies, and detectives that readers may need a scorecard.
Timely and tense; a worthy addition to a thriller series.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 227
Publisher: Down & Out Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.
Having been falsely convicted of murder himself years ago, prosecutor Rusty Sabich defies common wisdom in defending his romantic partner’s adopted son against the same accusation.
Now 76, Rusty has retired to the (fictitious) Skageon Region in the upper Midwest, far removed from Kindle County, Turow’s Chicago stand-in, where he was a star attorney and judge. Aaron Housley, a Black man raised in a bleached rural environment, has had his troubles, including serving four months for holding drugs purchased by Mae Potter, his erratic, on-and-off girlfriend. Now, after suddenly disappearing to parts unknown with her, he returns alone. When days go by without Mae’s reappearance, it is widely assumed that Aaron harmed her. Why else would he be in possession of her phone? Following the discovery of Mae’s strangled body and incriminating evidence that points to Aaron, Rusty steps in. Opposed in court by the uncontrollable, gloriously named prosecutor Hiram Jackdorp, he fears he’s in a lose-lose situation. If he fails to get Aaron off, which is highly possible, the boy’s mother, Bea, will never forgive him. If Rusty wins the case, the quietly detached Bea—who, like half the town, has secrets—will have trouble living with the unsparing methods Rusty uses to free Aaron. In attempting to match, or at least approach, the brilliance of his groundbreaking masterpiece Presumed Innocent (1987), Turow has his own odds to overcome. No minor achievement like a previous follow-up, Innocent (2010), the new novel is a powerful display of straightforward narrative, stuffed with compelling descriptions of people, places, and the legal process. No one stages courtroom scenes better than this celebrated Chicago attorney. But the book, whose overly long scenes add up to more than 500 pages, mostly lacks the gripping intensity and high moral drama to keep those pages turning. It’s an absorbing and entertaining read, but Turow’s fans have come to expect more than that.
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538706367
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 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
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