A taut, timely, terrific thriller.
A freshly minted police detective doesn’t believe a man died of natural causes, and his investigation leads all the way to Russia.
In Meredith’s fast-paced thriller, San Francisco homicide detective Steve Nguyen gets his first solo assignment: investigate the death of 31-year-old Luke Miller, an accountant at The Glass Foundation. Established by Julian Glass, an Eastern European transplant with ties to the United States Senate, the foundation supports groups focusing on education, health, and the environment. Steve’s news of Luke’s suspicious death—no forced entry, drugs, or trauma—shocks the foundation’s human resources head, Jennifer Krauss. Although 10 years older than Luke, the two were close friends. Jenn marveled at Luke’s attention to detail, saying he could find “things, little things, buried deep in an audit.” Unknown to anyone except Executive Director Roger Dayton, Luke also found one big thing: a file detailing questionable payments from international companies. Roger, who has ties to Russia, told his Russian contact that Luke discovered the file. The Russian arranged for the accountant’s elimination by an assassin and suggested that Luke may have told Jenn about his discovery. Forget #MeToo: Roger woos his underling to find out. He also helps in bugging her apartment and phone, allowing the Russians to hear what Steve tells her about the investigation’s progress. Meanwhile, Jenn becomes intrigued with Steve. She asks his cousin Tina—a smart-mouthed lawyer—for Steve’s backstory and learns “he’s addled with self-doubt.” Indeed, the detective’s sessions with his therapist add depth to the character and make the book more than a thriller, albeit an exciting one. Meredith’s characters are intriguing, fresh, and flawed. For example, Tina wears her “most revealing blouses to police interrogations. She’d use anything to her advantage, including her well-proportioned figure.” Steve—a Vietnamese American Stanford Law dropout and Bruce Lee look-alike, per Tina—graduated from the University of California at Berkeley at the age of 20. But he now has trouble fitting in as a policeman—“a career not wholly embraced” by his family. The plot, laced with deception and betrayal, seems frighteningly possible. Women and minorities have significant roles; the dialogue is smart; and the descriptions are strong: “It was noon, and the squad room smelled like a food court.”
A taut, timely, terrific thriller.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-60452-191-7
Page Count: 390
Publisher: BluewaterPress LLC
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.
Unbeknownst to each other, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett and outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski embark on equally urgent pursuits that converge in a way neither of them suspects.
Nate, who’s been off the grid ever since his wife, Liv, was killed in a fire intended to kill him too in Three-Inch Teeth (2024), has sworn vengeance on murderous conspirator Axel Soledad. After shooting several of Soledad’s hirelings, he joins forces with his friend and fellow Special Forces vet Geronimo Jones, who’s tracked him down, to chase his quarry deep into the woods. Governor Spencer Rulon, meanwhile, has pressed Joe into service once again to find veteran hunting guide Spike Rankin and his new assistant, Mark Eisele, who just happens to be Rulon’s son-in-law. Although nobody’s heard from the men for two days, the governor doesn’t want his wife and daughter to know they’re missing, and that means not alerting the media or the local sheriff, who’s no fan of Rulon’s anyway. Readers who’ve already seen Rankin and Eisele overpowered and imprisoned by a mysterious crew they ran into while they were setting up for the elk hunting season will assume that Soledad is behind their kidnapping as well. But Box will keep everyone guessing about exactly how Soledad and the ragtag military cult he’s gathered around him plan to confront the military-industrial complex he’s persuaded them is a clear and present danger. You know you’re in for a wild ride when Joe, saying goodbye to Marybeth, his long-suffering wife, promises her, “I’ll do my job and not cross the line.”
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851050
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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