A thrilling, breakneck tale, but one that’s a bit overcrowded.
A fast-paced police mystery set among the islands of Hawaii.
Errol Coutinho is a detective for the Hawaii County Police who has his work cut out for him when his wife’s best friend, Eleanor, turns up stabbed to death. Coutinho has suspicions that Eleanor’s missing boyfriend, Jerry Wyatt, may also be the infamous and mysterious drug dealer known as Gustav Trondheim (“The name that Big Island pakalolo [marijuana] dealers used to terrify their subordinates”). While hunting for Wyatt, Coutinho meets Diana Andrews, president of Litvinov Associates and the daughter of another drug dealer, Morrison, who leads him to a former sergeant whose corruption landed him in prison on Oahu. Added to this complex web of crime is an eerie woman who seems to be following Coutinho’s wife, Lucy, and Diana’s half sister, Jill. Tucher does an excellent job of combining the gritty and procedural elements of a detective story with the beauty of the Hawaiian Islands—although Coutinho makes it a point to clarify that “certain places in his state…rivaled anything in New Jersey for soul-destroying squalor.” The prose is clear and to the point, with dialogue that’s similarly direct, as in an early exchange between Coutinho and Diana by phone, when he’s searching for her father: She says, “I’m five thousand miles away. And even if I was there, I wouldn’t lift a finger.” “Cold.” “There’s history.” The story’s pace is a bit too rapid, with a few too many characters to keep track of, which leaves little room for readers to simply sit with the events of the narrative; as such, it might have benefited from some breathing room here and there. Overall, though, it’s a successful whodunit.
A thrilling, breakneck tale, but one that’s a bit overcrowded.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64396-192-7
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Shotgun Honey
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.
Lt. Eve Dallas and her colleagues in the New York Police and Security Department step outside their comfort zone into counterterrorism.
Back in 2024, during the stressful time of the Urban Wars, a courageous band calling themselves The Twelve fought Dominion and other violent fringe groups that sought to end civilization as we know it, despite the presence of a traitor in their own midst. Now, 37 years later, someone’s killed Giovanni Rossi, a retired cybersecurity expert who was one of The Twelve, an hour or so after a summons—ostensibly from another veteran of the group—brought him from Rome to New York. On the body, officers called to the scene find a copy of Dallas’ business card that’s been embellished with a flamboyant threat to annihilate the seven surviving members of The Twelve. Obligingly inviting all seven to New York—a move you’d think would make it a lot easier for their nemesis to wipe them all out at once—Dallas soon forms a theory about the killer’s identity and sets a trap to draw him out. But her plan turns into a narrow miss, upping the stakes on both sides, for now the killer knows Dallas is on to him. It’s in the nature of the case that there’s less mystery and detection than usual in this long-running franchise—the biggest surprise turns out to be the connection between Dallas and her quarry—but the thrills keep on coming, and the final interrogation, though highly predictable in its broad outlines, is as satisfying as ever.
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370792
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
© 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.
