A crunchy detective novel set in the world of California surfers.
Two beach-lovers set up a detective agency in Jones’ mystery novel, the second in a series.
Thad Hanlon, surfer and certified public accountant, has just opened a private investigation business in the Five Cities area of the California Central Coast. He and his new partner, attorney and martial artist Bri de la Guerra, are both reeling from the deaths of their significant others three years ago—and both are eager to get their agency off the ground by landing an inaugural client. A case arrives just in the nick of time, right outside the Land Cruiser out of which Thad and his 3-year-old son are currently living: Krystle Dudamel, a former exotic dancer from Bakersfield, is looking for her missing 14-year-old son Mobius, a surfing prodigy known around the Pismo Pier as Moby Dude. “The kid was respectable for a 14-year-old but very aggro,” narrates Hanlon. “Always snaking some local’s swell and cutting them off. Being hyper-aggressive in the water is not the best way to win friends and influence people.” Could Mobius’ disappearance be linked to the murder of a local gang member, whose body was recently disinterred from the Oceano Beach sand? Hanlon and Bri will have to find out…that is, if they ever want to secure a second client. Jones’ prose effectively conveys Hanlon’s laid-back attitude, and the plot features a number of entertaining, surfer-specific elements, as when Hanlon finds a message encoded in a pile of boards: “They were stacked helter-skelter, the top side of the boards facing up. No serious surfer would do that. Leave boards in direct sunlight for the wax to melt. Strange. Had to be a cipher. Had to be some kind of message.” Neither Hanlon nor Bri appearto be particularly haunted by their losses, but it may simply be that the book’s lighthearted tone has little space for mourning. Instead, Jones delivers a proper beach read, both in form and content.
A crunchy detective novel set in the world of California surfers.Pub Date: March 17, 2025
ISBN: 9781509260218
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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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