A stylish and thoughtful crime novel.
An unemployed war veteran investigates a tragic crime in Gates’ 1960-set mystery novel, the second in a series.
Harry Cogbill has gotten himself fired again. This time it’s from the combination restaurant-gift shop across the river from his home in King George County, Virginia, where he worked as a grill cook. After getting startled by a New York mafioso in the restaurant, Cogbill, a shell-shocked World War II vet, blacked out and roughed up his boss. His unemployment is not well received by his wife, Ethel Burkitt, who wants better things for Harry and isn’t afraid to give him the cold shoulder to force him in the right direction. A few days after the firing, while hunting for a new job, Harry learns that one of his co-workers at the restaurant, William Johnson, is now wanted for stabbing a man to death. Harry can’t believe the young Black man—a good kid—would do such a thing and assumes he’s being scapegoated. After speaking to the young man’s family, Cogbill learns the still-at-large William did commit the murder, though Cogbill can’t figure out why. Putting his job search on hold, Cogbill turns amateur detective—a role he’s played in the past—in order to get to the bottom of the crime. Doing so, he’ll run up against the worst that King George County has to offer: transplant mobsters, local crooks, and the deeply entrenched racism of the South. Can Cogbill once again quiet his demons, catch the bad guys, and get back in good with his Ethel? Gates’ measured prose carries a tinge of the Southern Gothic, lending a biblical weight to the narrative: “The weather had turned cold and the sun had begun its annual retreat to the throne of judgment from which it cast its pale, solitary eye upon the grey and barren earth.” Though he trades in the tropes of the crime novel, Gates is most deeply interested in the psychology of his characters and the way they fit (or don’t) in the world. Fans of the previous Harry Cogbill novel will not be disappointed.
A stylish and thoughtful crime novel.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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