Electrifying characters elevate this well-crafted detective tale.
This thriller finds a Brooklyn private investigator facing a vicious gangster and a dubious Russian boxer.
It hasn’t been easy for Det. Gina Marie Cototi to keep up with her hefty caseload, primarily consisting of insurance fraud. But her troubles only surge when someone steals her 1963 Corvette Stingray, a mint-condition classic that’s been in her family for 60 years. In trying to get her car back, she mingles with criminals and unavoidably incites the wrath of mobster Luca Mura. Meanwhile, an insurance case leads her to boxer Vlad Rzhevsky. The Russian seems to take a liking to Gina, and while he may prove an ally in dealing with Mura, he has his hands in such criminal endeavors as illegal steroid distribution. Gina’s encounters with Mura unsurprisingly turn dire. Luckily, she has others on her side who are much more reliable than Rzhevsky, from her older sister/roommate, Theresa, to former parole officer and potential romantic interest Rocco Benelli. Kelter delivers some terrific set pieces, including one of Rzhevsky’s boxing matches and a “hoity-toity” Japanese restaurant where something illicit is going down. An often vibrant cast complements these backdrops—the entertainingly unpredictable boxer, Gina’s not-so-legitimate businessman cousin, and her unabashedly promiscuous sister (“She projected the kind of heat that made guys walk face-first into walls. Father John at the local parish once offered to leave the church for her”). Gina herself is a well-drawn protagonist, a gumshoe who endures men’s groping hands and condescending terms of endearment (including sweetie). But in this series opener, readers see very little of the sleuth’s investigative skills, as there’s no real mystery or much evidence to dig into. She’s nevertheless capable and holds her own in confrontations, with the novel’s latter half yielding some perilous situations. The book likewise has a few shocks, especially regarding one character, who provides an effective teaser for the sequel.
Electrifying characters elevate this well-crafted detective tale.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781685133528
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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