A smart, gripping crime thriller about the corrosive price of vengeance.
A former gambler teams up with a former police detective to investigate the fate of a missing mob enforcer in Farrell’s mystery novel.
Arlene Adams, the owner of Chicago’s Thornton Racetrack, calls in private investigator and sports gambler Eddie O’Connell and his uncle, Mike, a retired police detective. Arlene thinks the duo might be perfectly placed to help with a peculiar problem: She’s been having bad dreams about the missing love of her life (and, unbeknownst to her, a professional mob hit man), Porter “the Pastor” Pearson, in which he seems to repeatedly ask her (his words are unclear), “Why aren’t you looking for me, Arlene?” Eddie is skeptical at first, but Arlene has been contacted by Pearson’s old fellow hitman, the Deacon, and Uncle Mike is enticed by all the cold cases he could help to close. Meeting with the Deacon sets in motion a twisty plot involving said cold cases, an unexpected new murder, and the lurking dangers of the high-rolling world of gambling and its connections to crime. With the help of Eddie’s former girlfriend, Nicole, now a famous professional poker player in Las Vegas, Eddie and Mike soon make connections to the power structure undergirding the world of shady finance, where they meet “hedge fund celebrity” Eliot Scullion. Conducting a tense investigation in which any one of their new acquaintances could be a murderer, Eddie and Uncle Mike must be careful not to become victims themselves.
Much like the previous outings in this series, Farrell’s foray into the interconnected worlds of gambling and organized crime yields a story full of narrative crackle and well-drawn characters, here enhanced by the added element of Wall Street “masters of the universe” (plus a few criminal Russians as a bonus). The author’s skill at pacing is superb, without any lulls or dead-end subplots, and his ear for characterization is so keen that huge swaths of the book are carried by dialogue alone. Eddie and Uncle Mike naturally occupy the spotlight, but secondary characters like Nicole (and even Arlene Adams) are handled with textured believability (including the Deacon, for whom readers will feel sympathy but no affection). The interplay between Uncle Mike’s world of law enforcement and the series’ recurring mob family, the Burrascanos, is handled with pleasing nuance, especially in this latest installment, in which Uncle Mike’s long and ethically spotty history with both the Deacon and one of his victims is gradually laid bare to Eddie. These revelations reopen Eddie’s oldest and most painful family wounds, and Farrell steadfastly resists the temptation to sink into cheap melodrama. The book takes some confident and intensely satisfying swings at maturing Eddie without fundamentally altering the great chemistry between the two heroes, and the element of personal redemption (working in the bright lights of Vegas, Eddie feels anew the pull of the gambling world he’s left behind for respectability) adds some light to the plot’s many dark elements. As with the earlier books in this series, this latest will leave readers eager for another outing.
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781736593240
Page Count: 346
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
So, Paradise isn’t paradise, and the Parker legacy lives on.
Parker’s Jesse Stone series continues with more trouble in Paradise, Massachusetts.
Police Chief Jesse Stone does a welfare check at the urging of a local citizen named Matthew Peebles and discovers a dead body in a room piled high with trash and old Polaroids depicting murder victims, either garroted or shot in the head. Who werethese victims? Chief Stone improbably keeps the investigation local—no need to complicate the story with the state police or the FBI—and that helps maintain the small-town flavor of this entertaining tale. Stone hires a new cop, Derek Tate, for his understaffed department. But to put it mildly, Tate is a poor fit. Boss and newcomer have radically different concepts of policing: Stone sees himself as a servant of his community, while Tate only wants to catch criminals and crack heads. At one point, Stone asks him what he did on his shift: “Did you give a tourist directions? Did you help an old lady cross the street or get a little girl’s cat out of a tree? Anything at all like that?” Tate replies “That’s not what real cops do,” and proceeds to alienate “beloved institutional figure” Daisy, cafe owner and longtime provider of donuts and muffins to Paradise’s finest. Indeed, Tate could be a model fascist, and Stone’s biggest mistake is not firing him. Meanwhile, Peebles fears for his life because of his “aging mobster” great uncle, who just might have something to do with all those murders. If Peebles says anything to the cops, he knows he’s a dead man. Hell, he’s probably doomed anyway. Stone is a stand-up cop who puts his life on the line for the town he loves, and his dealings with friends and colleagues are fun to witness: “I’m the chief. I’m supposed to tell you what to do,” he tells Molly Crane, his deputy chief. “It’s adorable that you think that,” she replies. And when all Paradise cops are banned from Daisy’s cafe because of Tate’s stupidity, Stone navigates treacherous territory while showing respect. This is Farnsworth’s first entry in the series created by Robert Parker, and fans will be pleased.
So, Paradise isn’t paradise, and the Parker legacy lives on.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593544761
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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