Both a complex thriller and a well-drawn period piece.
A pair of detectives contend with corruption while trying to solve a bizarre pair of seemingly unrelated murders in Elin’s mystery.
In 1969, police detective James Plishka’s life suddenly gets more complicated. The widower, who lives in Lackawanna, New York, is enjoying his burgeoning relationship with local waitress Jennifer Simon, but he’s having trouble connecting with his troubled teen son, Robert. His chief gives him a new trainee: Tom Baldwin, the only Black officer on the Lackawanna force. Baldwin, a former college basketball star, shoulders his own burden—he was promoted over white cops with more experience, which isn’t earning him any new friends. A reluctant Plishka brings Baldwin up to date on his cases, including the mysterious death of honor student Sarah Simpson. Then a call comes in about a body found at the cinder drop, where Bethlehem Steel dumps molten slag into Lake Erie. The deceased is identified as radical priest and lawyer Martin Goezina, who has cases pending against both the steel company over environmental concerns and the city regarding a proposed housing development. The detectives discover a connection between Simpson and Goezina—they’re both tied into a book the latter was writing that would expose government officials, businessmen, and drug dealers in the U.S. and Honduras. They have so many suspects and so little time. The author spent a quarter-century in the entertainment business, and his cinematic vision is evident in this debut novel. He vividly captures that pivotal moment when, amid a counterculture revolution, citizens started to question the noxious side effects of the U.S. steel industry. Racism plays a prominent role in this novel (“There are about ten thousand very angry white people in this city who would do almost anything to stop that housing development”), though the most conspicuous evil on display is greed. Elin’s relatable protagonists are both at personal crossroads, earning readers’ sympathy as they gather a diverse team of allies, doggedly plugging along until the case reaches a shocking but satisfying conclusion.
Both a complex thriller and a well-drawn period piece.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9798218227463
Page Count: -
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Fascinating main characters and a clever plot add up to an exciting read.
A thriller with bloody murders and plenty of suspects and featuring an unlikely partnership between two FBI investigators.
FBI consultant Amos Decker has a lot on his mind. The huge fellow once played for the Cleveland Browns in the NFL until he received a catastrophic brain injury, leaving him with synesthesia; he sees death as electric blue. More pertinent to the plot, he also has hyperthymesia, or spontaneous and highly accurate recall. On the one hand, his memories can be horrible. He’d once come home to find his wife and daughter murdered, dead in pools of blood. Later, he listens helplessly on the telephone while his ex-partner shoots herself in the mouth. On the other hand, his memory helps him solve every case he's given. Now he's sent to Florida with a brand-new partner, Special Agent Frederica White, to investigate the murder of a federal judge. Both partners are pissed at their last-minute pairing, and they immediately see themselves as a bad fit. White is a diminutive Black single mother of two who has a double black belt in karate “because I hate getting my ass kicked.” (The author doesn't mention Decker's race, but since he's being contrasted with his new partner in every way, perhaps readers are expected to see him as White. Clarity would be nice.) Their case is strange: Judge Julia Cummins was stabbed 10 times and her face covered with a mask, while her bodyguard was shot to death. Decker and White puzzle over the “very contrarian crime scene” where two murders seem to have been committed by two different people in the same place. The plot gets complex, with suspects galore. But the interpersonal dynamic between Decker and White is just as interesting as the solution to the murders, which doesn't come easily. At first, they’d like to be done with each other and go their separate ways. But as they work together, their mutual respect rises and—alas—the tension between them fades almost completely. The pair will make a great series duo, especially if a bit of that initial tension between them returns. And Baldacci shouldn’t give Decker a pass on his tortured memories, because readers enjoy suffering heroes. It's not enough that his near-perfect recall helps him in his job.
Fascinating main characters and a clever plot add up to an exciting read.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1982-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
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