A thrilling addition to an old but still vital literary genre.
In this hard-boiled crime novel, a California detective tries to connect the murder of a drug cartel enforcer with the killing of an entire family.
Frank Pinson’s life is an unholy mess—he’s an alcoholic; his wife of 25 years, Miranda, recently killed herself; and he’s estranged from his two kids. Nevertheless, he’s a homicide detective in San Diego, and so when someone is murdered, he shows up for work. Frank and his partner, Slade “Skinny” Ryerson, catch a gruesome case—a man is found stuffed into an oil barrel, shot, and mutilated. They discover his name is Enrico Frederico Pablo Castaneda, and, judging by the tattoo on his neck, he was part of a drug cartel. The young man who found him, Turner Malcolm, volunteers some apparently irrelevant information—he’s heard about a family that was murdered and buried, and his tip turns out to be solid. Mark Jacoby, a real estate developer, and his wife and daughter disappeared. Frank and Slade locate them—dead and interred—and are convinced their murders are connected to Castaneda’s. Phillips constructs a complex but grippingly lurid tale that artfully follows the ligature that binds the killing of a cartel henchman to a grander political conspiracy. In many ways, the book is the formulaic expression of a very specific literary genre—Pinson is a cynical and emotionally distraught man who pours the waning energy and decency he has left into his ghastly job. In fact, the author’s prose is so conspicuously evocative of this literary type it often seems like intentional self-parody: “Plenty of beauty out here in the devil’s playground. But that’s a twisted hell, too. Because every second somebody’s got to die.” Nonetheless, this remains an intelligently conceived and executed crime drama, and what it lacks in originality, it compensates for with a captivating story and well-drawn characters.
A thrilling addition to an old but still vital literary genre.Pub Date: July 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73709-781-5
Page Count: 274
Publisher: All Due Respect
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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