A well-done crime yarn but not for the straight-laced or those prone to fantods.
Book 8 in DeMille’s John Corey series unlocks a complex murder mystery set on Fire Island.
The jokes start right away: “You can’t drink all day unless you start in the morning.” Corey is a former NYPD homicide detective, and he's currently "NYU—New York Unemployed." He has plenty of enemies, like the Russian SVR intelligence service, which wants him dead—but waiting for that plotline to develop is like waiting for Godot. Ex-lover Det. Beth Penrose conveys an offer that he become a consultant to Security Solutions Investigative Services, “a very tacky private investigative agency” located on Suffolk County farmland with a giant hedge maze as a neighbor. Though Beth doesn't say so, the plan seems to be that Corey will be her confidential informant, getting inside Security Solutions to learn if it has any connection to the killings of nine young Long Island women. Security Solutions is a fun-loving outfit, with after-hours parties like Thirsty Thursdays. You’ve got your booze, your broads with names like Tiffany, your cops both present and ex, your politicians, a disbarred lawyer—fertile and dangerous grounds for Corey’s snooping. Like the maze, the plot has “twisting paths with lots of dead ends,” but “you have to wake up real early to pull one over on John Corey.” But before the guns start blasting, he fires his “pocket rocket” into a willing woman, a suspect named Amy. “Emission accomplished,” he later muses. Ah yes, Corey has a million sex jokes that would have teenagers TikTok-ing “ROFLMAO.” Are there nude beaches in Bermuda? He’d love to check out the Bermuda triangles. Is tonight “poker night? Or poke her night?” And why do strippers have names like Tiffany and not Best Buy? Anyway, Corey hasn’t settled down with a woman: “Ospreys mate for life,” he states. “But are they happy?” Oh yes, again with the plot: There’s a tough, unsolved murder case with interlocking crimes and suspects that ends in a fiery finish.
A well-done crime yarn but not for the straight-laced or those prone to fantods.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0178-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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