Good thriller. Historic figures seldom ring true in fiction, but Quinn pulls it off.
Ties forged in the trenches of WWI link a New York private eye with the future head of the CIA, in a well-done 1939-set thriller from Quinn, whose 1994 Banished Children of Eve covered the same city in the Civil War.
Fintan Dunne was an up-and-coming homicide detective until his honesty became a problem for the corruption-riddled department. Concentrating on divorce work, he makes do in the late Depression with a cheap office and public transportation until pretty Cuban Elba Corado shows up with a case that puts him back in the murder investigation business. Elba’s much older half-brother Walter Grillo has been charged with the grisly slaying of a nurse. While Dunne tries to avoid taking on a case that would throw him into competition with his former colleagues on the force, real-life Admiral Wilhelm Canaris in Berlin, chief of German military intelligence, tries to avoid enlistment in the cause against the Führer he detests. And on Wall Street, Medal of Honor winner William Donovan, who served in the 69th Regiment with Dunne, does uneasy business with creepily ambitious prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey. The three plotlines begin slowly to merge as Dunne takes up the case of Grillo, who’s on the short list for execution. The slain nurse worked for a suave doctor whose bodyguard is a thug with ties to the U.S. Nazi movement and its overlords in Berlin. And the doctor, who has his own creepy sanitarium in the Bronx, turns out to be involved in the eugenics movement. The investigation puts Dunne in agreeable contact with a savvy prostitute who buys her dresses at Elba’s shop, but it also brings him into painful contact with the worst of his erstwhile colleagues, the creeps who framed Grillo and who now force Dunne to get help from Donovan. Everything comes to a head in the freak hurricane of 1938.
Good thriller. Historic figures seldom ring true in fiction, but Quinn pulls it off.Pub Date: June 20, 2005
ISBN: 1-58567-597-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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