A detective story that’s sexy on the surface and smart to the core.
From a mine deep below Angola’s surface to a penthouse high above Back Bay in Boston, a pair of “financial detectives” investigates a corporate shark engaged in rare Earth minerals—and maybe murder—in this geopolitical thriller.
At the start of Masters’ second Boozy McBain and Boston O’Daniel novel, geologist Daniel Neto sneaks mineral samples out of a pitch-black African tunnel leading from a restricted zone 800 feet below. Leaving the area, he encounters a guard who says he’s been given “the green light to handle things my own way”—and his way relies on a machete and a crocodile. Meanwhile, in Beantown, engineer and geologist Harold Rogers is about to sell his company, HR Tech, to another mining outfit known as Africa’s Future Resources. HR Tech recently developed proprietary technology to extract and process minerals, which skyrocketed the company’s stock. Rogers, who describes gorgeous redhead O’Daniel and McBain as “a swimsuit model and an alcoholic,” hires the designer-dressed sleuths to perform due diligence analysis prior to the sale. As the two investigate, they steer through corporate and government agency regulations and roadblocks, and they come up against Rodney Henry, AFR’s major shareholder. He’s a middle-aged, tough player in the international mining fraternity. While McBain flies to Africa to check out the AFR mines where Neto was gathering samples, O’Daniel stays local to cover Henry—figuratively as well as literally in his penthouse bedroom. And although McBain promises O’Daniel that when he goes to Africa, he won’t take up with a former lover living there, he does connect with his blond ex, and the “air conditioning could barely keep up with the two of them.”
Aside from giving his main characters names that invite eye rolls and chuckles, Masters offers readers an intelligently written book about big business, ambition, seduction, and danger. The author’s experience working in international finance supplies authenticity to the novel, and his familiarity with Boston adds richness. Characters are complex. On the cusp of 30, and 10 years younger than McBain, O’Daniel is an analytic wunderkind with an hourglass figure wrapped in Gucci; is quick to anger; and still has feelings of inadequacy stemming from a hardscrabble past. The fact that Henry, who grew up dirt poor, recognizes those feelings in her draws her to him. McBain also suffers from flaws. He drinks too much (well, he is Boozy), can’t stop smoking, and still stings from a years-old divorce. But any failings make the high-power investigators more intriguing and relatable. Exploiting Earth’s resources is a timely topic, as are the stock market angle and heart-wrenching descriptions of African poverty. Details about McBain and O’Daniel’s past cases and their supposedly platonic relationship emerge slowly. O’Daniel could be talking about readers when she tells McBain: “Never give them too much too soon....Make them work for it.” Dialogue is sharp and often amusing; for example, one mining executive tells McBain: “We are all ruthless sons of bitches when it comes to the land. At the end of the day, we crawl out of a hole in the ground. Remember that.”
A detective story that’s sexy on the surface and smart to the core.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64999-595-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Lost Haven Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
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
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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