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THE TRUTH OF IT ALL

In the end, justice is done.

A beleaguered defense attorney catches a case from hell.

Julia Geary is an Iraq War widow. Although she has a job as a public defender, it doesn’t pay much, so she and her toddler son, Calvin, live with her mother-in-law, Beverly Sullivan, a former farm girl who prides herself on having earned a place among Duck Creek’s elite. Beverly seems to blame Julia for her son’s death even though enlisting was Michael’s idea, not his wife’s. And Julia’s widowhood is a mixed bag. It makes Chief Public Defender Bill Decker loath to lay her off when times are tough, but it lands her a case no one wants: defending Muslim immigrant Sami Mohammed, a high school senior accused of raping classmate Ana Olsen during soccer practice. Once news gets out that Julia’s defending Sami, her life swiftly tanks. Her personal information is spread over social media, leading angry neighbors to protest outside her house. Her son is thrown out of preschool, leaving Grandma Beverly, shunned by her bridge club, to babysit. Sami won’t tell her anything, and Ana claims it was too dark to see her assailant. Although much of Julia’s tale is a boilerplate litany of assaults on the righteous by the self-righteous, Florio invests her characters with enough humanity, along with touches of humility, to make it worth the read.

In the end, justice is done.

Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-64385-857-9

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crooked Lane

Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021

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NIGHTSHADE

As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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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