A wonderful corrective for your pandemic-induced cabin fever. Yes, things could be much, much worse.
Farrow’s brutal take on the locked-room mystery presents a murder committed inside a secure group ward in the Joliette Institution for Women near Montreal in 1994.
Lady Jail doesn’t confine its residents in separate cells but parcels them out in group quarters, like the one in which eight women doing time together suddenly find their number abruptly reduced to seven. Someone has strangled Florence, who’s locked up for throwing acid in a rival’s face, in the group bathroom using a length of wire that's been smuggled in. The killer is clearly one of the other prisoners—senior inmate Doi, who attacked her daughter with a hatchet; Malka, the next oldest, who poisoned her husband; Temple, who smuggles guns for the mob; Rozlynn, who celebrated her 18th birthday by killing her father; Courtney, who stabbed her best friend to death when she caught her flirting; her inseparable pal, Jodi, who shot a man during her boyfriend’s convenience-store robbery; and newcomer Abigail, an embezzler who’s still hiding the millions she stole—unless it’s really correctional officer Isaure Dabrezil, who’s working at Lady Jail during her yearlong suspension from the Sûreté du Québec. The job of figuring out whodunit is given to DS Émile Cinq-Mars, of the Montreal Police Service fraud squad, because he arrested Abi and because Dabrezil’s presence would render any SQ investigation problematic. Farrow keeps the story’s development as intense as the claustrophobic setting until he’s ready to unleash a bravura, hyperextended denouement.
A wonderful corrective for your pandemic-induced cabin fever. Yes, things could be much, much worse.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7278-9073-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
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
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.
A woman’s life takes a stunning turn and a wall comes tumbling down in this tense Cold War spy drama.
In Berlin in 1989, the wall is about to crumble, and Anne Simpson’s husband, Stefan Koehler, goes missing. She is a translator working with refugees from the communist bloc, and he is a piano tuner who travels around Europe with orchestras. Or so he claims. German intelligence service the BND and America’s CIA bring her in for questioning, wrongly thinking she’s protecting him. Soon she begins to learn more about Stefan, whom she had met in the Netherlands a few years ago. She realizes he’s a “gregarious musician with easy charm who collected friends like a beachcomber collects shells, keeping a few, discarding most.” Police find his wallet in a canal and his prized zither in nearby bushes but not his body. Has he been murdered? What’s going on? And why does the BND care? If Stefan is alive, he’s in deep trouble, because he’s believed to be working for the Stasi. She’s told “the dead have a way of showing up. It is only the living who hide.” And she’s quite believable when she wonders, “Can you grieve for someone who betrayed you?” Smart and observant, she notes that the reaction by one of her interrogators is “as false as his toupee. Obvious, uncalled for, and easily put on.” Lurking behind the scenes is the Matchmaker, who specializes in finding women—“American. Divorced. Unhappy,” and possibly having access to Western secrets—who will fall for one of his Romeos. Anne is the perfect fit. “The matchmaker turned love into tradecraft,” a CIA agent tells her. But espionage is an amoral business where duty trumps decency, and “deploring the morality of spies is like deploring violence in boxers.” It’s a sentiment John le Carré would have endorsed, but Anne may have the final word.
Intrigue, murder, and vengeance make for a darkly enjoyable read.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-865-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
© 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.
