Talton continues to ladle out murky complications long after most patrons will be looking for the exit. Readers most likely...
History professor–turned–sheriff’s deputy David Mapstone celebrates the 40th anniversary of the only recorded murder of an American journalist on American soil by reopening the case, with decidedly mixed results.
In 1978, as he was carried from his burning car to the hospital where he’d die, Phoenix Gazette reporter Charles Page moaned, “They finally got me. Reid, Mafia, RaceCo! Find Mark Reid.” In response, Reid, the enforcer for Page’s old nemesis, land-fraud king Ned Warren, went to prison for planting the bomb that killed Page. So did roofing contractor Dick Kemperton, who detonated the device, and contractor Darren Howard, who allegedly paid for the hit. All of them are now too dead to implicate anyone else, but there have always been rumors that higher-ups like Warren or “wealthy rancher” Freeman Burke Sr., were behind the killing. In honor of its anniversary, Maricopa County Sheriff Mike Peralta, nettled by a text message that mixes taunts, threats, and Shakespeare tags, wants Deputy David Mapstone, who’s already solved 117 cold cases, to solve this one within three weeks. Dave’s wife, computer whiz Lindsey, is still recovering from a near-fatal shooting (High Country Nocturne, 2015), but that doesn’t stop her from identifying the owner of the phone that sent the text as Rudy Jarvis, Reid’s unacknowledged son, who gets killed when his own car explodes, setting off a string of “canonical” crimes that echo Page’s murder and a series of related outrages in the present tense. Working sometimes with, sometimes against history student Malik Jones, Dave plunges into a conspiracy that seems to involve every noted Arizona native from Bruce Babbitt to Barry Goldwater.
Talton continues to ladle out murky complications long after most patrons will be looking for the exit. Readers most likely to last till the final curtain are those with a serious interest in the real-life criminal history of Phoenix.Pub Date: May 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4642-0957-4
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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