A propulsive plot and engaging characters help make up for some awkward writing.
Buchanan’s third Sean McPherson novel again pits Sean “Mick” McPherson and the forces of good against the archvillain Georgio “The Bull” Gambino and his lethal henchmen.
This thriller begins when a hired valet is killed by a car bomb at Mick and Emma Benton’s wedding at the Pines & Quill retreat in the picturesque village of Fairhaven, not far from Bellingham Bay in Washington state. The backstory for the murder involves many killings—all orchestrated by the vengeful Gambino—including more than one attempt to kill Mick and Emma. The star of this particular show is Gambino’s protégé, Toni Bianco, a stone cold killer passing as a Bellingham police officer—not the only Gambino mole in the BPD. (Gambino’s soldiers are everywhere and can be identified by the “Family First” tattoo on their lower backs.) More violence ensues, in Bellingham, San Francisco, and New Orleans. After much violence and death and a bang-up conclusion, the good guys come out on top, but barely. The kicker, though, is that Georgio is still out there, untouched and plotting (of course, there is yet another sequel, Iniquity, in the works). All the backstory this requires isn’t always gracefully interwoven. What’s more distracting, however, is that as the plot unfolds, characters recount details that they—and readers—already know well from earlier parts of the book (“including Kevin Pearce, the valet who died in the explosion when he moved Mick and Emma’s Jeep at the wedding”). This kind of needless repetition happens more than once, and it feels not just odd, but oddly scripted. The characters’ speech can also seem unnatural: They speak not of “Gambino” but of “Georgio ‘The Bull’ Gambino,” as if respecting trademark law. That said, there are many engaging characters. Mick’s brother-in-law is a superb chef who prepares tantalizing dishes. Except for the occasional murder, the Pines & Quill seems a real Eden, lovingly described as such. And if Gambino is a ruthless antagonist, Buchanan lightens the plot with appealing palate cleansers such as a canine romance.
A propulsive plot and engaging characters help make up for some awkward writing.Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-68463-194-0
Page Count: 312
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2022
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
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.
Following the mysterious disappearance of his wife, a struggling London novelist journeys to a remote Scottish island to try to get his mojo back—but all, of course, is not what it seems.
Grady Green hits the pinnacle of his publishing career on the same night that his life goes off the rails—first his book lands on the New York Times bestseller list, and then his wife, Abby, goes missing on her way home. A year later, Grady is a mere shadow of his former self: out of money and out of ideas. So, when his agent, Abby’s godmother, suggests that he spend some time on the Isle of Amberly, in a log cabin left to her by one of her writers, it seems as good a plan as any. With free housing for himself and his dog and a beautiful, distraction-free environment, maybe he can finally complete the next novel. But from the very beginning, Grady’s experiences with Amberly seem weird, if not downright ominous: As a visitor, he’s not allowed to bring his car onto the island; the local businesses are only open for a few hours at a time; and there are no birds. At all. Not to mention the skeletal hand he finds buried under the floorboards of the cabin, the creepy harmonica music in the woods, and the occasional sighting of a woman in a red coat who’s a dead ringer for Abby. As Grady falls deeper and deeper into insomnia and alcoholism, he begins to realize his being on the island is no accident—and that should make him very afraid. Through occasional chapters from before Abby’s disappearance, told from her point of view, we learn that Grady is not necessarily a reliable narrator, and the book’s slow unfolding of dread, mystery, and then truth is both creative and well-paced. Every chapter heading is an oxymoron, like the title, reminding us of the contradictions at the heart of every story.
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781250337788
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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