Formulaic but great good fun for genre fans.
Mainline Philadelphia homicide detective Matt Payne battles mobsters in Griffin’s (The Vigilantes, 2010, etc.) latest book in his Badge of Honor series.
Krystal Gonzalez takes two to the head in the Society Hill townhouse of Maggie McMain. McCain’s missing, but she’s not a suspect. It’s feared the culprit who murdered Gonzalez has kidnapped or killed McCain. McCain, who runs Mary’s House, a shelter for foster children, is the daughter of a Philadelphia mover and shaker, and Gonzalez, once a client of Mary’s House, may have become entangled in the tentacles of the Los Zetas Mexican drug cartel. Authorities know too that elements of the Russian mob, busy worming its way into Philadelphia politics via payoffs from Cayman Island bank accounts, are allying with the cartel. Griffin offers the usual good guys of movie-star proportions—"six feet tall, a lithely muscled 170 pounds...thick dark hair...neat and short." Nearly everyone on the side of the angels is wealthy or connected to wealth or to each other. There are down-to-the-bullets-in-the-magazine descriptions of weapons—the trusty Colt .45 1911A is a favorite—as well as techno-gear from throwaway cellphones to anonymous email servers. Griffin serves up enough exposition about geographical locales and amenities, exotic and prosaic, to provide useful travel guides. Much of the narrative could be a CliffNotes synopsis of the corruption of legitimate processes—EB-5 visas for moneyed immigrants, international banking, capital investment funds—by drug and prostitution profits. Rich immigrants and drug lords manipulate; naive girls and runaway teens end up dead and disappeared into El Pozolero’s bath of sodium hydroxide lye beads; and McCain goes to ground in a posh Virgin Islands resort. All but the last few chapters are a setup for the quick but open-ended conclusion, where Payne lets bullets fly and bad guys die.
Formulaic but great good fun for genre fans.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-16257-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
