A Hawaiian coda provides the best news of all: This distinguished series has plenty of miles to go. Aloha, and hooray.
Renée Ballard’s latest outing with the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit begins in the most embarrassing way imaginable before the stakes rise higher and higher.
While Ballard is out surfing one morning, someone gets into her car and makes off with her phone, gun, wallet, and badge. Fearing that she’ll get tossed off the unit she loves if word gets out, she doesn’t report the theft, a decision that considerably complicates her ability to do her job. That’s especially awkward because of the cases just over the horizon. Fresh evidence indicates that the Pillowcase Rapist, who murdered his last victim in 2005, may be Superior Court Judge Jonathan Purcell, a man nobody wants to cross. The lifting of Ballard’s stuff fits into a larger pattern of thefts from surfing beaches by a pair of lowlifes who were particularly interested in a police badge this time because the guy they worked for had clients who were planning something big and bad. The biggest case of all is landed by Madeline Bosch, the daughter of Ballard’s retired mentor Harry Bosch, who uncovers a lead in her very first day as a volunteer on the unit that might just close the most famous unsolved case in the history of Los Angeles by identifying the Black Dahlia killer. Everything will work out fine if Ballard can only hold the emerging details about the Pillowcase Rapist close to her chest, keep her fibs about following established procedures and direct orders from being found out, prevent her boss from tossing Maddie Bosch off the unit when her cold case turns red-hot, and recover her credentials without letting anyone know they’re missing.
A Hawaiian coda provides the best news of all: This distinguished series has plenty of miles to go. Aloha, and hooray.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9780316563796
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.
Lt. Eve Dallas and her colleagues in the New York Police and Security Department step outside their comfort zone into counterterrorism.
Back in 2024, during the stressful time of the Urban Wars, a courageous band calling themselves The Twelve fought Dominion and other violent fringe groups that sought to end civilization as we know it, despite the presence of a traitor in their own midst. Now, 37 years later, someone’s killed Giovanni Rossi, a retired cybersecurity expert who was one of The Twelve, an hour or so after a summons—ostensibly from another veteran of the group—brought him from Rome to New York. On the body, officers called to the scene find a copy of Dallas’ business card that’s been embellished with a flamboyant threat to annihilate the seven surviving members of The Twelve. Obligingly inviting all seven to New York—a move you’d think would make it a lot easier for their nemesis to wipe them all out at once—Dallas soon forms a theory about the killer’s identity and sets a trap to draw him out. But her plan turns into a narrow miss, upping the stakes on both sides, for now the killer knows Dallas is on to him. It’s in the nature of the case that there’s less mystery and detection than usual in this long-running franchise—the biggest surprise turns out to be the connection between Dallas and her quarry—but the thrills keep on coming, and the final interrogation, though highly predictable in its broad outlines, is as satisfying as ever.
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370792
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
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