Lawson’s matter-of-fact tone, walking a fine line between satire and reportage, propels his tale forward despite its limited...
Bagman/fixer Joe DeMarco, who has a law degree but has never practiced law, gets to see a whole new side of the legal system when he’s expertly framed for murder.
DeMarco’s minding his own business, working late in his subbasement office in the Capitol, when an assassin shoots House majority whip Lyle Canton, who’s also minding his own business in his spiffier office upstairs, to death. The ubiquitous security cameras strewn throughout the building catch little of note. But since DeMarco’s patron, House minority leader John Mahoney, has been a frequent target of Canton’s attacks, and since the killer sticks around for long enough to plant some highly incriminating evidence in DeMarco’s office after he leaves, it’s not long before he’s arrested. DeMarco, who, incredibly enough, has heretofore spent only a single night in jail despite his checkered career (House Witness, 2018, etc.), can now expect a stay of at least a year while his attorney, Janet Evans, prepares his defense. The most likely way his stay can be shortened lies with billionaire businessman Sebastian Spear, the lover whom the slain politician’s wife, Jean Canton, had been on her way to meet when she wrapped her car around a tree. It’s pretty obvious to pretty much everyone except the police and the FBI that Spear hired Canton’s murderer; now he’s trying to reach inside the Alexandria jail and have DeMarco killed, too. So the story quickly settles into a high-stakes groove of thrust and counterthrust: Bill Brayden, Spear Industry’s head of security, keeps hatching more and more inventive schemes to get DeMarco’s fellow prisoners to kill him; Mahoney and his well-connected allies do everything they can to head off most of these attempts, foil the ones they can’t head off, and bring down Brayden, Spear, and the actual killer before they succeed.
Lawson’s matter-of-fact tone, walking a fine line between satire and reportage, propels his tale forward despite its limited capacity for surprise. And his final sequence, both blackly comic and ineffably sad, provides the perfect conclusion.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2930-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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