Despite the high body count, Tracy (Shoot to Thrill, 2010, etc.) seems to have taken something off her customary manic...
Amazing but true: The Monkeewrench gang, that misfit quartet of lovable cybergeeks who moonlight as the nemesis of Twin Cities serial killers, actually gets upstaged by the Minneapolis Police Department.
Battered, paranoid Monkeewrench founder Grace MacBride’s recuperative sailing trip through the Florida Keys with retired FBI desk-jockey John Smith is rudely interrupted by a pair of killers who climb aboard Smith’s boat and start to cut his throat. Grace handily dispatches them both and rolls the bodies overboard, but she’s seriously rattled to find Smith’s particulars on one of them. Clearly these men weren’t pirates, but assassins who specifically targeted her host. Back in Minneapolis, Ojibwe teen Aimee Sergeant, abducted from Sand Lake Reservation for the sex trade, has her own throat slit when she tries to escape. Ojibwe Officer Bad Heart Bull just happens to be on hand to rescue the four even-younger girls who were snatched with her. In the meantime, even more surprisingly, Joe Hardy, a cancer-ridden Special Ops sharpshooter, executes Aimee’s Somali kidnappers. A sizable stash of weaponry and a remarkably similar murder spree in faraway Culver City confirm Minneapolis PD Detective Leo Magozzi’s hunch that the sale of the kidnapped girls was intended to provide financing for a gang of Somali terrorists who’ve gone after Smith for mysterious reasons that provide the slender mystery’s most pleasing surprise. The rest of the Monkeewrench crew—Annie Belinsky, Harley Davidson and Roadrunner—don’t have much more to do than the abducted Ojibwe girls; for better or worse, this show mostly belongs to Magozzi, his partner, Gino Rolseth, and the imperturbable Smith.
Despite the high body count, Tracy (Shoot to Thrill, 2010, etc.) seems to have taken something off her customary manic formula: The murders are much less florid than usual, and the regulars seem almost subdued.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15804-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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