Workmanlike and consistently absorbing but not spectacular except for that eye-rolling epilogue.
An Alabama personal injury lawyer who seems to have modeled his professional and personal life on Better Call Saul is called on for his first criminal case.
Nobody disputes a few simple facts: That handyman Waylon Pike was carrying on an affair with his frequent employer Jana Waters; that he killed her husband, Dr. Braxton Waters; and that he confessed as much first to a casual acquaintance and then to the police. What’s under debate is whether the $15,000 Pike received for the murder came, as he told the cops, from Jana Waters, who just happened to withdraw that exact sum from her bank the day before, or from someone else. For most residents of Guntersville, this debate is purely theoretical since they’re sure that Jana hired her adulterous husband’s killer. Even Jana’s brother, billboard-loving attorney Jason Rich, finds it hard to believe that his long-estranged sister isn’t guilty. But he’s moved to defend her by the tearful pleas of her daughters, Niecy and Nola, whom he hasn’t seen for years, and by a more pressing threat by local drug king Tyson Cade, who’d taken advantage of Jana repeatedly to defer her payment of the $50,000 she owed him for his product. Cade doesn’t want Jana to testify in her own defense, and he really doesn’t want his own name to come up in the trial. So he demands that Jason not take the case, letting it go to a less-motivated appointed attorney, or if he does take the case, that he keep Jana off the stand. The obstacles would be formidable even for an experienced criminal defense attorney; a novice like Jason can only pray for a miracle. Bailey conscientiously sweats the details all the way to a dazzling but not entirely persuasive double-twist ending.
Workmanlike and consistently absorbing but not spectacular except for that eye-rolling epilogue.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-3727-3
Page Count: 379
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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 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
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