Part cops-versus–drugs-and-guns procedural, part elemental morality play, part fire-and-brimstone mythmaking, all of it...
Parker reaches once more into the real-life story of Operation Fast & Furious to conclude his sprawling, multivolume saga of Charlie Hood, the seen-it-all deputy of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.
Operation Blowdown, which already went south, is now coming back north. Three years after a thousand Love 32s were smuggled into Mexico under the noses of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the weapons have begun to make their way back into the U.S. It’s only a matter of time before liberal California congressman Scott Freeman is assassinated by Lonnie Rovanna, a schizophrenic former bodyguard who’s been told to kill Freeman by the voices he hears on the radio, helpfully supplied with a Love 32 by Dr. Todd Stren, a psychologist who consults with the San Diego Superior Court. Charlie quickly realizes that Dr. Stren is actually Mike Finnegan, the bathroom-products wholesaler who’s also a modern devil (The Border Lords, 2011, etc.). Even before Freeman hits the floor, Charlie’s already under fire from his rabid congressional colleague Darren Grossly; once Freeman has been pronounced dead and somebody’s got to take the blame, it’s clear that Charlie’s days with the LASD are numbered. Getting forced into two paid leaves, however, merely sharpens Charlie’s appetite and frees his hands to go after his prey: Finnegan, North Baja Cartel head Carlos Herredia, falling LASD star Bradley Jones and a ring of insider thieves, including the extremely well-armed Clint Wampler, who’s already cherishing a bitter personal grudge against Charlie for hurting his finger. The ensuing ritualistic showdowns, which seem to owe as much to The Lord of the Rings as to other cop novels, show Parker burrowing deep into his characters, so that both heroes and villains spring to unnervingly complicated life.
Part cops-versus–drugs-and-guns procedural, part elemental morality play, part fire-and-brimstone mythmaking, all of it inimitably Parker.Pub Date: April 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-525-95317-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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
With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.
A young Philadelphia policewoman searches for her addicted sister on the streets.
The title of Moore’s (The Unseen World, 2016, etc.) fourth novel refers to “a long bright river of departed souls,” the souls of people dead from opioid overdoses in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington. The book opens with a long paragraph that's just a list of names, most of whom don’t have a role in the plot, but the last two entries are key: “Our mother. Our father.” As the novel opens, narrator Mickey Fitzpatrick—a bright but emotionally damaged single mom—is responding with her partner to a call. A dead girl has turned up in an abandoned train yard frequented by junkies. Mickey is terrified that it will be her estranged sister, Kacey, whom she hasn’t seen in a while. The two were raised by their grandmother, a cold, bitter woman who never recovered from the overdose death of the girls' mother. Mickey herself is awkward and tense in all social situations; when she talks about her childhood she mentions watching the other kids from the window, trying to memorize their mannerisms so she could “steal them and use them [her]self.” She is close with no one except her 4-year-old son, Thomas, whom she barely sees because she works so much, leaving him with an unenthusiastic babysitter. Opioid abuse per se is not the focus of the action—the book centers on the search for Kacey. Obsessed with the possibility that her sister will end up dead before she can find her, Mickey breaches protocol and makes a series of impulsive decisions that get her in trouble. The pace is frustratingly slow for most of the book, then picks up with a flurry of revelations and developments toward the end, bringing characters onstage we don’t have enough time to get to know. The narrator of this atmospheric crime novel has every reason to be difficult and guarded, but the reader may find her no easier to bond with than the other characters do.
With its flat, staccato tone and mournful mood, it’s almost as if the book itself were suffering from depression.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-54067-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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