A suspenseful and often gripping thriller that features plenty of murder and menace for genre fans.
The serial executions of New York City policemen spurs a retired cop to action in this crime novel.
Takemoto’s debut novel, Bio-Justice (2017), was an SF thriller, but this sophomore effort is a straightforward police procedural with plenty of mayhem and intrigue. As the story opens, it’s the summer of 1996, and recently retired, well-known Los Angeles detective Douglas Hale, who’s nearing 50, is preparing to relocate to New York City. However, at the moment, there’s a serial murderer on the loose in Manhattan who’s targeting police officers and collecting their badges as grisly souvenirs. Soon after Doug and his new wife, technology company executive Karen, arrive in the city and get settled, a new issue of Time magazine comes out with Doug’s photo on the cover—the result of a high-profile interview he gave before he left LA. This places him right in the killer’s crosshairs—and it soon becomes clear that the young murderer has a vicious, personal vendetta against the former cop. The delusional killer is a well-developed character, and the author fleshes out his motives with skill, revealing him to be the son of Doug’s former girlfriend, a drug addict. Indeed, Takemoto embodies the murderer with so much anger and resentment that he becomes a veritable monster prowling the streets of Manhattan. The revelation of the murderer’s identity happens early in the narrative, which stunts the suspense a bit. However, the author proves to be a keen storyteller who knows his way around a police procedural, and he keeps the action breathless while also offering plenty of detail.
A New York City police chief briefs Doug on the recent cop killings and begs for his seasoned expertise to help solve the case before he loses more officers. Of course, Doug agrees, and the story pivots straight into the mind of the killer, resulting in an action-packed cat-and-mouse thriller that puts Doug, his new bride, and several others in mortal danger. The murderer, who’s revealed to be a victim of severe physical abuse, meticulously plans out a “nice and slow” slaughter of Doug, which he sees as “a family reunion and a funeral wrapped into one.” Doug is shown to be a formidable policeman who immediately gets down to the work he’s known for by retracing his ex-girlfriend’s life among drug dealers in the hope of tracking down her abandoned son before he kills again. Along the way, Takemoto effectively incorporates social commentary on dysfunctional foster care and mental health systems into his story. Doug and Karen are instantly likable characters made believable by their nagging insecurities, petty jealousies, and past long-term relationships. As the investigation heats up, so does the melodrama between Karen and Doug, and the latter eventually comes face to face with the killer in one of the book’s more gruesome scenes. The story speeds along to a heart-pounding finale that thankfully leaves room for possible future installments detailing Doug’s further adventures.
A suspenseful and often gripping thriller that features plenty of murder and menace for genre fans.Pub Date: July 16, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.
The eternal jostling for power in Rome and the Vatican is juiced by a development that attracts the attention of the Magellan Billet and its foremost alumnus, Cotton Malone.
Eric Gaetano Casaburi, secretary of Italy’s National Freedom Party, anticipates a decisive victory for the party if Sergio Cardinal Ascolani, the Vatican’s secretary of state, will lend his full-throated support. Of course, the Church isn’t supposed to meddle in contemporary politics, but Eric makes an offer he doesn’t think Ascolani can refuse. Five hundred years ago, Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici loaned Pope Julius II ten million florins the Church never repaid. That debt is still legally payable to anyone who proves to be a surviving member of the Medici family, and Eric believes he can prove exactly that. Although Malone, called in to investigate the bona fides of Ascolani’s enemy Jason Cardinal Richter, has already found a fortune hidden in Richter’s apartment, Richter swears that he’s being framed, and the violent deaths of three anonymous functionaries seem to bear him out. So, Malone forges a series of alliances with Richter, with wealthy businesswoman Camilla Baines, and ultimately with an even more surprising party to prevent Ascolani and Thomas Dewberry, a hired assassin who’s both a sociopath and a devout Catholic, from swaying the upcoming election in return for Eric’s forgiving the ancient debt. An extended closing note shows how inventively Berry mingled history and fiction to weave this tangled web. Readers invested in learning more about the Medicis can be assured that the brief glimpse of them in a prologue set in 1512 is only the beginning.
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538770566
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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