An unpredictable, rowdy thriller that sometimes shines.
A former FBI agent sees it all—conniving lawyers, mistaken identities, police shootouts, car chases, and Hollywood celebrities—in Talib’s second installment of his thriller series.
After rescuing, falling in love with, and marrying movie star Goldie Saint Helen, Iraq veteran and former FBI agent Blake Deco has the perfect life: He spends his days screenwriting and managing his popular restaurant along the beach, and Goldie is up for an exciting part in Far Out, a movie about a 1960s private eye named Gypsy Star. But their Shangri-La implodes when Goldie bonks her head in a bad car accident and develops dissociative amnesia. “Her reality and fantasy have overlapped, and she thinks she’s someone else.” Not just anyone else, in fact, but Gypsy Star. Gypsy is witty and relentless, searching for a missing young woman who might be wrapped up in a CIA plot involving mind-controlling drugs. Blake has his hands full as he attempts to play along with his wife’s feisty new persona as she makes enemies and friends and earns more than a few odd looks. If that wasn’t enough, Goldie’s lawyers are scheming to get the confused star put away for good—and steal her millions while they’re at it. Much of the novel is a clever, quirky drama filled with silly misunderstandings and situational comedy (and a whole lot of ’60s slang). The last quarter is a generic thriller in which the reader sees much less of Goldie (and Gypsy) and much more of Blake and his veteran pals getting into all sorts of action-packed shenanigans. It’s easy to see that author Talib enjoys writing action; the car chases, shootouts, and other thriller staples move seamlessly from page to page. However, it is Goldie—or rather Gypsy—who is the heart of the story, bringing hilarity and light through a creative premise. The smart, quick-paced plot works well, but much of the cast is unlikable. Also, Mexican characters often appear as racist stereotypes. Overall, Talib’s second Blake Deco outing is fun and inventive, but many of the players need makeovers.
An unpredictable, rowdy thriller that sometimes shines.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2024
ISBN: 978-1955062923
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Running Wild Press
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2023
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
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