A knotty, suspenseful, and entertaining whodunit, mixing gritty vibes with keen energy.
In Selbo’s third Dee Rommel mystery, grisly murders reveal a sex-trafficking ring in placid Portland, Maine.
The third installment of Selbo’s Dee Rommel series finds the 20-something private eye and former Portland police officer, who lost half of her left leg in the line of duty, investigating the murder of Hannah Wall, a driver for local ride-hailing app WheelieMaine. The young woman was found with her throat cut in her car, which crashed and burned. Dee is drawn into the case when her assistant, Abshir Jama, asks her help for his friend Yuusuf Farax, a high school senior and fellow Somali immigrant, who witnessed the crash and then had his backpack stolen by a possible perp at the scene. The next morning, he found the word “Silence” spray-painted on his house. Dee calls on her cyber-sleuth friend, Jade, for help; she recognizes Hannah as a volunteer at a teen crisis hotline who was a victim of sex-trafficking. Jade connects Dee with the organization’s director, Nancy Camsion; however, when Dee goes to meet her, she finds Nancy’s apartment door bashed in and Nancy dead in the bathroom with a slashed throat. Yuusuf reluctantly reveals that he knew Hannah personally, and that she’d formed a support group for teens who’d participated in parties where they were offered drugs and money to have sex with anonymous strangers. Along the way, Dee compares notes with Portland police detective and longtime flame Robbie Donato, who urges her to steer clear of Hannah’s case.
Over the course of this mystery, Selbo paints an atmospheric portrait of a lived-in Portland that’s quaint on the outside but rotten on the inside. She populates it with decent people and sharp operators, hardworking immigrants, and local lowlifes redolent of “the smell of beer, pot and unwashed armpits.” Her writing is shrewd, canny, and subtle, and it’s always alive to small gradations of behavior that have serious import: “Part of my job is recognizing lies. There are lots of tells: Slight hesitation. A swallowing of words. False bravado. Not engaging in eye contact. A change in vocal tone. That’s what I’ve just heard.” In Selbo’s evocative, punchy prose, Dee comes across as a compelling and complex hero—one who’s painfully aware of her vulnerabilities but accepts them with hardboiled aplomb: “It’s the slash on her throat…that brings up the bile. My diaphragm convulses, I frantically push myself up—fast—and turn to the wall just as the yellow-ish waste projectiles from my throat and hits the tile. Shit. Now I’ve contaminated the scene.” Dee also ably discovers more puzzle pieces and persons of interest as the investigation proceeds, including Tip Flack, a squirrelly hacker and WheelieMaine’s CEO; Steph Byrne, her high school classmate who runs a high-fashion resale shop that employs troubled teens; and Steph’s slick developer boyfriend, Xavier Toomey, who immediately hits on Dee. Along the way, readers will root for her as she heads gamely toward the truth.
A knotty, suspenseful, and entertaining whodunit, mixing gritty vibes with keen energy.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781950627707
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Pandamoon Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.
Lt. Eve Dallas and her colleagues in the New York Police and Security Department step outside their comfort zone into counterterrorism.
Back in 2024, during the stressful time of the Urban Wars, a courageous band calling themselves The Twelve fought Dominion and other violent fringe groups that sought to end civilization as we know it, despite the presence of a traitor in their own midst. Now, 37 years later, someone’s killed Giovanni Rossi, a retired cybersecurity expert who was one of The Twelve, an hour or so after a summons—ostensibly from another veteran of the group—brought him from Rome to New York. On the body, officers called to the scene find a copy of Dallas’ business card that’s been embellished with a flamboyant threat to annihilate the seven surviving members of The Twelve. Obligingly inviting all seven to New York—a move you’d think would make it a lot easier for their nemesis to wipe them all out at once—Dallas soon forms a theory about the killer’s identity and sets a trap to draw him out. But her plan turns into a narrow miss, upping the stakes on both sides, for now the killer knows Dallas is on to him. It’s in the nature of the case that there’s less mystery and detection than usual in this long-running franchise—the biggest surprise turns out to be the connection between Dallas and her quarry—but the thrills keep on coming, and the final interrogation, though highly predictable in its broad outlines, is as satisfying as ever.
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370792
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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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