A smart, gripping crime thriller about the corrosive price of vengeance.
A former gambler teams up with a former police detective to investigate the fate of a missing mob enforcer in Farrell’s mystery novel.
Arlene Adams, the owner of Chicago’s Thornton Racetrack, calls in private investigator and sports gambler Eddie O’Connell and his uncle, Mike, a retired police detective. Arlene thinks the duo might be perfectly placed to help with a peculiar problem: She’s been having bad dreams about the missing love of her life (and, unbeknownst to her, a professional mob hit man), Porter “the Pastor” Pearson, in which he seems to repeatedly ask her (his words are unclear), “Why aren’t you looking for me, Arlene?” Eddie is skeptical at first, but Arlene has been contacted by Pearson’s old fellow hitman, the Deacon, and Uncle Mike is enticed by all the cold cases he could help to close. Meeting with the Deacon sets in motion a twisty plot involving said cold cases, an unexpected new murder, and the lurking dangers of the high-rolling world of gambling and its connections to crime. With the help of Eddie’s former girlfriend, Nicole, now a famous professional poker player in Las Vegas, Eddie and Mike soon make connections to the power structure undergirding the world of shady finance, where they meet “hedge fund celebrity” Eliot Scullion. Conducting a tense investigation in which any one of their new acquaintances could be a murderer, Eddie and Uncle Mike must be careful not to become victims themselves.
Much like the previous outings in this series, Farrell’s foray into the interconnected worlds of gambling and organized crime yields a story full of narrative crackle and well-drawn characters, here enhanced by the added element of Wall Street “masters of the universe” (plus a few criminal Russians as a bonus). The author’s skill at pacing is superb, without any lulls or dead-end subplots, and his ear for characterization is so keen that huge swaths of the book are carried by dialogue alone. Eddie and Uncle Mike naturally occupy the spotlight, but secondary characters like Nicole (and even Arlene Adams) are handled with textured believability (including the Deacon, for whom readers will feel sympathy but no affection). The interplay between Uncle Mike’s world of law enforcement and the series’ recurring mob family, the Burrascanos, is handled with pleasing nuance, especially in this latest installment, in which Uncle Mike’s long and ethically spotty history with both the Deacon and one of his victims is gradually laid bare to Eddie. These revelations reopen Eddie’s oldest and most painful family wounds, and Farrell steadfastly resists the temptation to sink into cheap melodrama. The book takes some confident and intensely satisfying swings at maturing Eddie without fundamentally altering the great chemistry between the two heroes, and the element of personal redemption (working in the bright lights of Vegas, Eddie feels anew the pull of the gambling world he’s left behind for respectability) adds some light to the plot’s many dark elements. As with the earlier books in this series, this latest will leave readers eager for another outing.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781736593240
Page Count: 346
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.
An aspiring mystery writer sets out to solve her great-aunt’s murder and inherit an estate.
Twenty-five-year-old Annie Adams has never met her great-aunt Frances, who prefers her small village to busy London. But when a mysterious letter arrives instructing Annie to come to Castle Knoll in Dorset to meet Frances and discuss her role as sole beneficiary of her great-aunt’s estate, Annie can’t resist. Unfortunately, she arrives to find Frances’ worst fears have come true: The elderly woman—who’s been haunted for decades by a fortuneteller’s prediction that this will happen—has been murdered, and her will dictates that she will leave her entire estate to Annie, but only if Annie solves her killing. It’s a cheeky if not exactly believable premise, especially since the local police don’t seem terribly opposed to it. Annie herself is an engaging presence, if a little too blind to the fact that she could be on the killer’s to-do list. Her roll call of suspects is pleasingly long, including but not limited to the local vicar, a one-time paramour of her great-aunt’s; a gardener who grows a lot more than flowers; shady developers and suspicious friends from Frances’ past; and Saxon, Annie’s crafty rival, who inherits the estate himself if he manages to solve the case first. Annie pieces together clues through readings of Frances’ journal, but the story eventually runs aground on the twin rocks of too much explanation and a flimsy climax. Cute dialogue gives way to lengthy exposition, and by the time Frances’ killer is revealed you may well be ready to leave Annie, Dorset, and Castle Knoll behind for the firmer ground of reality. Fans of cozy mysteries are likely to be more forgiving, but if you cast a skeptical eye toward amateur sleuths, this novel won’t change your mind about them.
Breezy, entertaining characters and a cheeky premise fall prey to too much explanation and an unlikely climax.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593474013
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
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