Pure enjoyment for anyone who doesn’t happen to own a home in the Valley.
A series of suspicious fires proves to be only the tip of the iceberg in Goldberg’s latest dispatch from the San Fernando Valley.
L.A. County Sheriff’s Department arson investigator Walter Sharpe and his gung-ho new partner, Andrew Walker, are called to the Chatsworth Nature Preserve, where someone has set a Toyota Camry ablaze. Soon afterward, following the trail of devastation left by a deadly virus that’s disappeared from Triax Biotech, homicide detectives Duncan Pavone, back from retirement, and Eve Ronin, who’s recently had a TV series based on her work, track down Triax microbiologist Patrick Lopresti, only to watch his house explode in a fireball before their eyes, leaving Lopresti inside, shot in the head in a bizarre apparent suicide. Justine Bryce, Lopresti’s lover and presumed partner in crime who’s also been exposed to the virus, has reacted by going on the lam. Even when the cops confront her, she refuses to surrender for fear of infecting someone else. In the meantime, Sharpe and Walker have uncovered an epidemic of house fires in and around the Twin Lakes development blamed on the remarkably similar failures of domestic electrical appliances. There’s clearly a mastermind behind this crime wave. But what’s the connection between this mastermind and the Triax employee who’s blown up his own house rather than give himself up along with the virus? The path to answers and convictions leads to a San Diego SciCon in which Eve and Walker dress up as Wonder Woman and the Mandalorian in order to approach their suspect without arousing any suspicion and, incidentally, to provide a suitably colorful not-quite-finale to this knockabout procedural.
Pure enjoyment for anyone who doesn’t happen to own a home in the Valley.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781662512384
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.
Stephanie Plum’s 31st adventure shows that Trenton’s preeminent fugitive-apprehension agent still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve, and needs every one of them.
The current caseload for Stephanie and Lula—the ex-prostitute file clerk at her cousin Vincent Plum’s bail bonds company, who serves as her unflappable sidekick—begins with two “failures to appear.” Eugene Fleck is suspected of being Robin Hoodie, who robs from the rich and, yes, distributes the proceeds to the poor. Racketeer Bruno Jug, who’s missed his court date on charges of tax evasion, is also suspected of drugging and raping a 14-year-old. But neither of these fugitives can hold a candle to Zoran Djordjevic, aka Fang, a self-proclaimed vampire wanted in connection with the gruesome fate of his late wife and three other missing women. As usual, Stephanie’s personal life is just as helter-skelter as her professional life as a bounty hunter. She’s managed to get herself engaged both to Det. Joe Morelli, of the Trenton PD, and Ranger, a former Special Forces agent who runs a private security firm; she thinks she may be pregnant; and she’s willing to marry the father, whichever of her fiances that turns out to be. On top of it all, her nothingburger schoolmate Herbert Slovinski suddenly pops up at one of the funerals she ferries her Grandma Mazur to, hitting on her relentlessly and gilding his importunities by cleaning and painting her shabby apartment and laying new carpet. Luckily, Lula’s on hand to offer cupcakes that stave off the worst disasters, and whenever this hodgepodge threatens to slow down, another FTA appears, or fails to appear.
As usual, Evanovich handles the funny stuff better (much better) than the mystery stuff.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781668003138
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
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