As densely plotted as Sears’ strong debut (Black Fridays, 2012), with complications that keep mounting in the race to the...
Disgraced Wall Street trader Jason Stafford hunts the proceeds of a scam more successful and grandly scaled than he ever dreamed of.
When he killed himself in prison, William Von Becker left an unholy mess behind. The Ponzi scheme he’d run for years had finally blown up, leaving the latest investors holding the bag. The rifts between his widow, Olivia, and her children—foreign-exchange expert Binks, prodigal son Virgil, Asperger’s-stricken Wyatt and daughter Morgan—make it hard for them to present a united front about anything. And they’re stung by accusations that as much as $3 billion is still unaccounted for. On the theory of setting a thief to catch a thief, Virgil hires Stafford to look for the missing money. Jason’s preliminary inquiries among William Von Becker’s associates and staffers don’t turn up the loot, but they do reveal another important player: Colombian banker Tulio Botero Castillo, who claims that Von Becker’s haul included $100 million in negotiable bearer bonds. Castillo’s under pressure from some unsavory types with quick trigger fingers to recover the bonds, and he’s more than happy to share the pressure with Stafford. Soon, the tax attorney whose murder kicks off the tale is joined by two other victims, whose deaths do not bring Stafford any closer to his goal. Meanwhile, his poisonous ex-wife, Evangeline Oubre, has left Louisiana for a stay in New York. She says it’s to make amends under her 12-step program and spend some time with her son, whose autism makes him a handful for either parent; Stafford’s lover, Skeli, predicts darkly that she’s looking to reunite with Stafford after the spectacular flameout of her second marriage. Any way you look at it, the man has serious problems.
As densely plotted as Sears’ strong debut (Black Fridays, 2012), with complications that keep mounting in the race to the final curtain. A particularly nice touch is the subordination of the scheming suspects to Stafford’s troubled, loving relationship with his son.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-15867-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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