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
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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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