An often-thrilling crime novel that explores questions of loyalty, justice, and morality.
In Wukas’ mystery, a veteran Chicago journalist thinks back to a murder case from his earliest days on the job.
Will Moore, a seasoned reporter for the Chicago Tribune, learns about the death, after a long illness, of a figure from his past—an elderly, retired Chicago police officer known as “Fuckin’ Frank” Foley, to whom he owes an unspecified debt. The story then flashes back to Will’s time as a young reporter for City News Bureau 20 years before. Will gets the job after breaking up with his girlfriend, dropping out of grad school, and, consequently, losing access to a trust fund from his wealthy family until he’s 35. Will works alongside Frank, whose intimidating presence and rigorous approach to police work leave a lasting impression on him. Around the same time, he begins a casual sexual relationship (which later becomes more complicated) with artist Mimi Brickman, and meets Terry Meyer, a pharmacist who illegally sells drugs to locals, including Will, who uses amphetamines to keep up with his job’s late hours. Will covers crime stories for the City News Bureau, but things get personal when his neighbor is murdered, and locals approach Will for help in avenging his neighbor’s death. Overall, Wukas succeeds in creating sympathetic characters that have exceptional depth; Will and Frank talk about the subjectivity of good and evil and how both police work and reporting are subject to biases. Additionally, the detailed descriptions of Chicago give the work a feeling of verisimilitude and paint a vivid picture of the city: “I quickly found sanctuary in the gray and green of the university neighborhood’s imposing limestone and ancient oaks on streets with wonderful names like Kimbark, Blackstone and Drexel.” However, other moments feel heavy-handed, leaning too heavily on Will’s background as a student majoring in the classics and quoting various philosophers in their native Greek and Latin. Still, the relationships between the characters remain dynamic, and the story’s mystery elements are well executed throughout.
An often-thrilling crime novel that explores questions of loyalty, justice, and morality.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798990463998
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Eckhartz Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 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
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.
Unbeknownst to each other, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett and outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski embark on equally urgent pursuits that converge in a way neither of them suspects.
Nate, who’s been off the grid ever since his wife, Liv, was killed in a fire intended to kill him too in Three-Inch Teeth (2024), has sworn vengeance on murderous conspirator Axel Soledad. After shooting several of Soledad’s hirelings, he joins forces with his friend and fellow Special Forces vet Geronimo Jones, who’s tracked him down, to chase his quarry deep into the woods. Governor Spencer Rulon, meanwhile, has pressed Joe into service once again to find veteran hunting guide Spike Rankin and his new assistant, Mark Eisele, who just happens to be Rulon’s son-in-law. Although nobody’s heard from the men for two days, the governor doesn’t want his wife and daughter to know they’re missing, and that means not alerting the media or the local sheriff, who’s no fan of Rulon’s anyway. Readers who’ve already seen Rankin and Eisele overpowered and imprisoned by a mysterious crew they ran into while they were setting up for the elk hunting season will assume that Soledad is behind their kidnapping as well. But Box will keep everyone guessing about exactly how Soledad and the ragtag military cult he’s gathered around him plan to confront the military-industrial complex he’s persuaded them is a clear and present danger. You know you’re in for a wild ride when Joe, saying goodbye to Marybeth, his long-suffering wife, promises her, “I’ll do my job and not cross the line.”
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851050
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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