Hard-case crimes with the bonus of a few surprising zingers.
Hard Case Crime completes its cycle of Collins’ novels about not-quite-reformed thief Nolan with his first appearance and one of his last.
In Spree, the later, longer, and more polished of the pair, Nolan’s live-in lover, Sherry, is kidnapped to pressure him into masterminding a grandly scaled robbery of the most tempting targets among the 50 stores in Missouri’s Brady Eighty mall. Coleman Comfort, the paterfamilias behind the scheme, already has a grudge against Nolan for killing his brother Sam and Sam’s two sons in an earlier plot that went violently off the rails, and it seems obvious that as soon as the heist is history, he plans to kill Sherry and Nolan anyway. In fact, his homicidal plans are even more extensive than that, though not if Nolan and his frequent accomplice Jon Ross have anything to say about it. Mourn the Living, the first story Collins wrote about Nolan, though not the first he published, is an informal homage to Richard Stark’s adventures of one-named criminal Parker. Owing a big favor to mobbed-up pencil pusher Sid Tisor, Nolan reluctantly agrees to look into the death of Tisor’s daughter, Irene, a Chelsey University student who fell 10 stories to her death, even though it’s going to bring him uncomfortably close to Chicago’s Franco crime family, who’ve already put a $250,000 bounty on his head for his past misdeeds against them. Was Irene high on LSD? Was she actually pushed? What details have been covered up by Chelsey cop Phil Saunders, who’s the cousin of incompetent gang boss George Franco’s financial secretary Irwin Elliot, the real power behind Chelsey’s thriving drug industry?
Hard-case crimes with the bonus of a few surprising zingers.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781789091465
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hard Case Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.
A routine break-in at the home of Sûreté homicide chief Armand Gamache leads slowly but surely to the revelation of a potentially calamitous threat to all Québec.
At first it seems as if nothing at all triggered the burglar alarm at Gamache’s home in Three Pines; it was literally a false alarm. It’s not till he receives a package containing his summer jacket that Gamache realizes someone really did get into his house, choosing to steal exactly this one item and return it with a cryptic note referring to “some malady…water” and “Angelica stems.” Having already refused to meet with Jeanne Caron, chief of staff to Marcus Lauzon, a powerful politician who’s already taken vengeance on Gamache and his family for not expunging his child’s criminal record, Gamache now agrees to meet with Charles Langlois, a marine biologist with ties to Caron who confesses to a leading role in stealing Gamache’s jacket. Their meeting ends inconclusively for Gamache, who’s convinced that Langlois is hiding something weighty, and all too conclusively for Langlois, who’s killed by a hit-and-run driver as he leaves. The news that Langlois had been investigating a water supply near the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups sends Gamache scurrying off to the abbey, where the plot steadily thickens until he’s led to ask how “an old recipe for Chartreuse” can possibly be connected to “a terrorist plot to poison Québec’s drinking water.” That’s a great question, and answering it will take the second half of this story, which spins ever more intricate connections among leading players that become deeply unsettling.
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781250328137
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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