An entertaining and engagingly complicated joyride.
A valuable painting, a friend in trouble, a dangerous loan shark, and an elaborate con game fuel Grayson’s sixth mystery novel in a series.
Kate Morgan, owner of a small independent movie studio, has a problem. She’s close to wrapping up production of the film Fade to Crimson, which is shooting in Seattle, but the project has been running low on funds. Unbeknown to her, Ray LeGrande—her boyfriend and the movie’s director—took it upon himself to find a temporary solution: He stole a valuable painting belonging to Kate’s father and used it as collateral for a 90-day loan of $500,000 in cash. Unfortunately, the lender is Billy Thorne, son of notorious loan shark Frank Thorne. Now time is running out, and Kate turns to private investigator Danny Logan for help. An initial investigative foray confirms what Danny and his partner, Toni Blair, suspect—that the Thornes are determined to keep the painting and sell it at auction. Logan Private Investigations calls upon the services of Henry Parker, con artist extraordinaire, who happens to have a personal score to settle with Thorne; he’s more than happy to set up an extravagant ruse to retrieve the painting before Kate’s father discovers it’s missing. Grayson, a fine storyteller, notes in his acknowledgements that he was inspired to become a writer after viewing the classic 1973 film The Sting, and here he creates his own intriguingly clever caper. Although readers are in on the secrets behind most of the deception, they’ll still find a few surprises in store. Lurking in the shadows of the narrative is a character with the capacity to torpedo the whole operation, which adds an additional layer of suspense. Overall, this page-turner is a bit light on character development, but it’s propelled by a steady supply of plot twists. Grayson meticulously crafts the hustle to create an enjoyable romp, and it all leads to a satisfyingly explosive conclusion—and a final tease to keep readers guessing.
An entertaining and engagingly complicated joyride.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Cedar Coast Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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