Mirroring the title of his marvelous debut novel, Laguna Heat (1985), Parker's third California thriller—after the uneven Little Saigon (1988)—is a moodily intense affair: the introspective and involving tale of a man who searches for his sister's killer among the citizens of Newport Beach. Cop-turned-treasure-hunter Jim Weir is glad to be back in his hometown after serving time on a frame-up in a Mexican jail. His older sister, Ann, greets him with good news—at 39, she's finally pregnant—and Newport cop Ray Cruz, her husband and Jim's best pal, is also there to share the joy. But that night Ann's body is found on the beach, stabbed 28 times. Who killed her? A local drunk reports seeing a cop car at the crime-scene, so at first Jim, hired by police chief Brian Dennison, digs into some local cops. Soon, however, a wild-card suspect arises: Horton Goins, who's just been released from the mental asylum he spent years in for killing a girl, and who (we know but Jim doesn't) now possesses Ann's missing diary—which confesses that she was pregnant not by husband Ray but by David Cantrell, a Trump-like developer and the father 24 years ago of her apparently aborted child. Did Cantrell kill Ann? He certainly seems responsible for toxic-dumping in local waters, key to an entangled subplot that plunks Jim in the middle of a ecology war between his activist mom and his girlfriend Becky, a mayoral candidate, and Cantrell and cop-chief Dennison, Becky's electroral opponent. Two scenes of stunning violence punctuate the narrative as Jim begins to investigate Cantrell and as the cops focus on Goins—whose ultimate identity proves as shocking, and as logical, a revelation as that of the real killer. A hothouse of full-bloomed characters and ripe emotions. Not as much fun as Heat—the action is too slowly deliberate, and sometimes overwhelmed by introspection—but a wiser, more mature work, resonant, literate, and powerful.
Pub Date: June 28, 1991
ISBN: 0312927924
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
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
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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