A briskly readable, if slightly uneven, whodunit to while away a long afternoon.
Hanafee offers readers two mysteries to solve in this mystery series entry set on an idyllic Florida island: one from 20 years ago and the other close to the present day.
It’s 2019, and jaded veteran reporter Wes Avery has come to South Florida to leave the rat race up north.His friend Leslie Elliott—the protagonist of Hanafee’s previous novel, Scavenger Tides (2020)—is an aspiring mystery author who tends to either find trouble or stir it up. Twenty years ago, 22-year-old Toby Mason shot himself in the head at a drunken party, but many townspeople don’t think it was the suicide that the shoddy police investigation concluded it was. Toby’s father has been trying to drink himself to death ever since, which gets Wes interested in the case. Meanwhile, two other characters from the previous book show up: One is Frank Johnson, charter fisherman, DEA informant, and Leslie’s boyfriend; the other is Jamie Thompson, drug runner. Johnson and Thompson have a rendezvous on the beach on a dark night and both wind up shot dead. Who may have hastened Toby’s death that night, and who killed Frank and Jamie? Hanafee moves things along in fine fashion, peppering the proceedings with good and unsettling lines: “I’ve discovered that on this island truth and fiction often walk the beach hand-in-hand,” Leslie says at one point. Many leads develop but few pan out; Wes manages to interview several witnesses to Toby’s death, but with mixed results, and Toby’s father is severely beaten. Some parts of the story seem forced, as when Leslie and Frank’s ex-wife, Janis, get drunk, bury the hatchet, and improbably become enthusiastic sleuthing partners. Everything finally works out, of course, although the resolution to Frank and Jamie’s story is a bit more surprising than Toby’s. The denouement may be a bit too sentimental for some readers, but not all.
A briskly readable, if slightly uneven, whodunit to while away a long afternoon.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 9781667820422
Page Count: 258
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.
The feds must protect an accused criminal and an orphaned girl.
Maybe you’ve met him before as protagonist of The 6:20 Man (2022): Ex-Army Ranger Travis Devine, who’d had the dubious fortune to tangle with “the girl on the train,” is now assigned by his homeland security boss to protect Danny Glass, who's awaiting trial on multiple RICO charges in Washington state. Devine has what it takes: He “was a closer, snooper, fixer, investigator,” and, when necessary, a killer. These skills are on full display as the deaths of three key witnesses grind justice to a temporary halt. Glass has a 12-year-old niece, Betsy Odom, and each is the other’s only living relative—her parents recently died of an apparent drug overdose. The FBI has temporary guardianship of Betsy, who's a handful. She tells Travis that though she’s not yet 13, she's 28 in “life-shit years.” The financially well-heeled Glass wants to be her legal guardian with an eye to eventual adoption, but what are his real motives? And what happens to her if he's convicted? Meanwhile, Betsy insists that her parents never touched drugs, and she begs Travis to find out how they really died. This becomes part of a mission that oozes danger. The small town of Ricketts has a woman mayor who’s full of charm on the surface, but deeply corrupt and deadly when crossed. She may be linked to a subversive group called "12/24/65," as in 1865, when the Ku Klux Klan beast was born. Blood flows, bombs explode, and people perish, both good guys and not-so-good guys. Readers might ponder why in fiction as well as in life, it sometimes seems necessary for many to die so one may live. And what about the girl on the train? She's not necessary to the plot, but she's a fun addition as she pops in and out of the pages, occasionally leaving notes for Travis. Maybe she still wants him dead.
Fast-moving excitement with a satisfying finish.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781538757901
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.
A routine break-in at the home of Sûreté homicide chief Armand Gamache leads slowly but surely to the revelation of a potentially calamitous threat to all Québec.
At first it seems as if nothing at all triggered the burglar alarm at Gamache’s home in Three Pines; it was literally a false alarm. It’s not till he receives a package containing his summer jacket that Gamache realizes someone really did get into his house, choosing to steal exactly this one item and return it with a cryptic note referring to “some malady…water” and “Angelica stems.” Having already refused to meet with Jeanne Caron, chief of staff to Marcus Lauzon, a powerful politician who’s already taken vengeance on Gamache and his family for not expunging his child’s criminal record, Gamache now agrees to meet with Charles Langlois, a marine biologist with ties to Caron who confesses to a leading role in stealing Gamache’s jacket. Their meeting ends inconclusively for Gamache, who’s convinced that Langlois is hiding something weighty, and all too conclusively for Langlois, who’s killed by a hit-and-run driver as he leaves. The news that Langlois had been investigating a water supply near the abbey of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups sends Gamache scurrying off to the abbey, where the plot steadily thickens until he’s led to ask how “an old recipe for Chartreuse” can possibly be connected to “a terrorist plot to poison Québec’s drinking water.” That’s a great question, and answering it will take the second half of this story, which spins ever more intricate connections among leading players that become deeply unsettling.
One of those rare triple-deckers that’s actually worth every page, every complication, every bead of sweat.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781250328137
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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