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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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