The superb cast propels a worthwhile mystery offset by a few too many tangents.
A London-based fixer investigates unrelated deaths that stir up numerous questions in Ruckus’ thriller, the second in the Mercenaries in Suits series.
Chance Yang is a “part-time fixer” living in London. It’s been less than a year since his former job brought him to England and into a stalker case involving his now-girlfriend Catherine Roxborough. Chance’s latest gig comes courtesy of Catherine’s university professor uncle, Alexander Roxborough, whose friend, Lewis Milken, asks Chance to look into the death of his older sister, Emma. She allegedly died of tuberculosis while teaching in Barcelona, but the family has troublingly few details about her illness and passing. The fixer hops onto a plane and manages to shed some light on the case, but it’s not long before someone else needs his help back in London. Another friend of Catherine’s uncle’s, this one a detective named Nigel Weatherby, is stymied by a deceptively simple murder—a fatal stabbing, followed immediately by the assailant’s accidental death as he sped away. The crime scene teems with unexplainable details: Accessories for a digital audio recorder (power adapter, operating manual) are present, but the device itself is suspiciously missing. At the detective’s suggestion, Chance goes undercover as a private math tutor to get close to a wealthy family that may have answers. As his ex-boss, Felipe Kazama, puts it, Chance is “damn good at worming information out of people” (Felipe, the comic highlight of the previous book in the series, remains a reliable font of advice, even if he buries it in self-indulgent diatribes). Ever-patient Chance knows that if he continues working his case, he’ll eventually hit on a clue that leads to an illuminating revelation.
Like the series’ introduction, A Chinese Remedy (2021), this sophomore installment moves at a leisurely pace. The well-established characters are dynamic—emotions run high when Catherine, who once caught her fiancé cheating on her, is convinced by a rumor that Chance has been equally unfaithful. Chance’s jobs usually aren’t the narrative’s focus, which instead spotlights such story elements as his relationship with Catherine and Felipe’s monopolization of discussions with long-winded dialogue. The novel is split into two interlinked stories: The first (and shorter of the two) centers on the Barcelona case and concludes with a solid wrap-up. The considerably longer second story, which opens with the detective’s murder case, features much more of Felipe. He’s indisputably intelligent and occasionally witty, and characters often recall insightful snippets from his lectures that become de facto guidelines, such as the “art of distraction is always more important than lies.” But in other instances, Felipe takes over the plot, as when his “weekend leadership bootcamp” spins off into political rants that last for pages. Nevertheless, the story does find a resolution as the final act provides a shocking character turn and a memorable denouement.
The superb cast propels a worthwhile mystery offset by a few too many tangents.Pub Date: June 16, 2022
ISBN: 9781915338235
Page Count: 505
Publisher: UK Book Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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