A collection of three gripping, well-told police procedurals.
Bird chronicles an aging New York detective’s cases in this trio of crime stories.
Mo Shuman is a police detective in New York’s 12th Precinct. Known as "Shuman the Human" for his unusually strong sense of empathy (at least for a cop), he finds his humanity challenged and reaffirmed in equal measure by the people he encounters on the Lower East Side. Along with his ex-partner and best friend, Mike Gallagher, Shuman is about the best New York has to offer when it comes to solving a tricky murder case, but now that he’s on the verge of retirement, he’s mentally preparing himself to leave it all behind; Bird covers the final cases of Shuman’s career in this omnibus collection. In “Murder at the Yeshiva,” the Yiddish-speaking Shuman is assigned to investigate the death of a yeshiva student underneath the Williamsburg Bridge. In fact, the young man was a student at the same yeshiva Shuman attended during an earlier, more religious period of his life. As Mo shepherds a new, less-experienced partner through the case, he’s moved to confront his relationship with his own Jewishness. In “One Murder at a Time,” Shuman eschews retirement to work with Gallagher again as part of a cold case unit. “Gallagher had pitched the Cold Case Squad as a bunch of dinosaurs who knew how to solve difficult cases. Shuman owed Gallagher big time. Gallagher had saved his life twice, and Shuman figured if he retired he’d never be able to pay off those debts.” It turns out, however, that some powerful people may not want two dinosaurs digging up long-buried bones. In the concluding “Go West Old Man,” murder strikes much closer to home—in Shuman’s own household—leaving the bereft ex-detective looking for a distraction from his pain. He finds one at the Texas border, of all places, where a reporter friend of his is suspected of murder after her girlfriend turns up missing. With each case, Shuman’s humanity is put further to the test—and eventually he may reach a breaking point.
Bird’s matter-of-fact prose mixes sober descriptions of his characters and the city with jocular back-and-forth exchanges between cops and civilians, as when Shuman’s lieutenant explains why he picked him and his partner for the yeshiva case: “ ‘Boss,’ said Dynaburski, ‘I really don’t know this yeshiva stuff.’ Mulroy turned to Dynaburski. ‘You’re Jewish, aren’t you?’ ‘But not like Orthodox or anything.’ ‘You two are the only Jewish homicide team in the city. Even Israel can’t put together a team like this.’ ” Shuman makes for a winning protagonist—professional, mildly introverted, slightly haunted, with a deep love of New York City and of the close-knit Puerto Rican family he married into. The pieces flow nicely into one another, telling a continuous story even as each feels self-contained. The transition to Texas in the final volume may strike some readers as jarring, but regardless of the setting, Bird manages to capture the ways in which crime—and particularly murder—seems inextricably woven into the American experience.
A collection of three gripping, well-told police procedurals.Pub Date: June 30, 2023
ISBN: 9798850121686
Page Count: 609
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
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
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.
Stephanie Plum’s 31st adventure shows that Trenton’s preeminent fugitive-apprehension agent still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve, and needs every one of them.
The current caseload for Stephanie and Lula—the ex-prostitute file clerk at her cousin Vincent Plum’s bail bonds company, who serves as her unflappable sidekick—begins with two “failures to appear.” Eugene Fleck is suspected of being Robin Hoodie, who robs from the rich and, yes, distributes the proceeds to the poor. Racketeer Bruno Jug, who’s missed his court date on charges of tax evasion, is also suspected of drugging and raping a 14-year-old. But neither of these fugitives can hold a candle to Zoran Djordjevic, aka Fang, a self-proclaimed vampire wanted in connection with the gruesome fate of his late wife and three other missing women. As usual, Stephanie’s personal life is just as helter-skelter as her professional life as a bounty hunter. She’s managed to get herself engaged both to Det. Joe Morelli, of the Trenton PD, and Ranger, a former Special Forces agent who runs a private security firm; she thinks she may be pregnant; and she’s willing to marry the father, whichever of her fiances that turns out to be. On top of it all, her nothingburger schoolmate Herbert Slovinski suddenly pops up at one of the funerals she ferries her Grandma Mazur to, hitting on her relentlessly and gilding his importunities by cleaning and painting her shabby apartment and laying new carpet. Luckily, Lula’s on hand to offer cupcakes that stave off the worst disasters, and whenever this hodgepodge threatens to slow down, another FTA appears, or fails to appear.
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781668003138
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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