bookshelf

FOR THOSE WHO KNOW THE ENDING

Name: FOR THOSE WHO KNOW THE ENDING
Author: Malcolm Mackay
ISBN: 978-0-316-55607-1

by Malcolm Mackay ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 8, 2018

Dour, dead-eyed, and appropriately disillusioned, though the unfolding is more ritualistic than suspenseful.

bookshelf

As a captured Czech killer sits bound in a Glasgow warehouse awaiting his fate, Mackay provides a series of flashbacks detailing the events that brought him to such a dire spot.

Martin Sivok is good at what he does, but after leaving Brno under some pressure, he doesn’t expect the opportunities for new work in a new home to fall into his lap. His drought ends when low-level dealer Usman Kassar invites him to serve as gunman on a routine heist he’s researched thoroughly. Unfortunately, Kassar’s research has been thorough enough to attract attention, and when he and Sivok break into the bookmaking establishment Donny Gregor runs for jailed crime boss Peter Jamieson (Every Night I Dream of Hell, 2017, etc.), Jamieson security consultant Nate Colgan and his predecessor, Stephen "Gully" Fitzgerald, are also on hand. Miraculously, Sivok and Kassar escape with 32,000 pounds and without killing anybody, and Kassar concludes: “It was a success.” But although they haven’t left any corpses behind, they’ve left enough clues to make it much likelier than they’d expected that Colgan and Fitzgerald can trace and identify them. Two months later, the sky still hasn’t fallen down around the thieves, and Sivok, pressed to make a down payment on a house for his live-in girlfriend’s daughter, reluctantly agrees to Kassar’s proposal for a second job. This one doesn’t go as fatality-free as the first, and the two thieves survive only because they’ve succeeded in turning two gangs fighting for control of Glasgow’s drug trade against each other. But despite the complete absence of law enforcement personnel (a nice touch), how long can their good luck continue when Kassar is more vulnerable than he realizes and when Sivok’s due to end up tied to a chair as the clock ticks down?

Dour, dead-eyed, and appropriately disillusioned, though the unfolding is more ritualistic than suspenseful.

Pub Date: May 8, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-316-55607-1

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018

Categories:

bookshelf

A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
FIRE AND BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
THE BONE CODE
by Kathy Reichs

bookshelf

BADLANDS

by C.J. Box ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015

A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...

bookshelf

Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.

Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.

A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.