A tension-fueled mystery with plenty of twists and two appealing sleuths.
In this detective series opener, a 27-year-old accountant becomes the target of a murderous cadre when he accepts a new assignment that takes him from Los Angeles to the East Coast center of power.
Thaddeus Hanlon, a former professional surfer who is a forensic accountant with a top CPA firm, Dodge Whitney; his wife, Marrisa; and close friend Abril “Bri” de la Guerra are enjoying a luxe annual corporate celebration. They are awaiting the return of Rafael “Rafi” Silva, Bri’s fiance and Thad’s best buddy, from Washington, D.C., where he has been working on a special project for Dodge Whitney. Instead, they receive a devastating phone call from Jenny Yu, Rafi’s Washington audit associate. It turns out that Rafi is dead. The police declare his death a suicide but Bri insists he has been murdered (“I know he didn’t kill himself…Rafi would never do that to me”). The next day, Thad is offered Rafi’s job, running an undercover audit of the country’s gold bullion reserve for the Treasury Department’s “Second Gold Commission” at a time when there is political interest in returning to the Gold Standard. The job requires him and six-months-pregnant Marrisa to move to the nation’s capital. It is a career-changing opportunity and a chance to investigate Rafi’s death with Bri. With Thad and Marrisa comfortably settled in a luxurious Georgetown brownstone, the accountant heads to the special project’s base of operations, the multilayered, secure Treasury Liberty Central building. Thad is ready to complete Rafi’s assignment—if he can decipher his buddy’s encrypted notes. Jones’ action-packed murder mystery—complete with two engaging amateur detectives, violent assaults, high-speed car chases through Washington, and an occasionally confusing plethora of bad guys—also serves as a primer on the history of America’s Gold Standard backing of the nation’s currency. Thad’s audit visit to the gold vault, 80 feet below ground at the Federal Reserve Bank in Lower Manhattan, raises the intriguing possibility of fake bricks mingled in with the legitimate bullion and takes readers through the metal-testing process. Woven into the gripping plot are sensual, detailed descriptions of Thad’s adventures riding the waves, which should please the surfer crowd and afford others a visceral sense of the experience.
A tension-fueled mystery with plenty of twists and two appealing sleuths.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781509251681
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.
Unbeknownst to each other, Wyoming Fish and Game Warden Joe Pickett and outlaw falconer Nate Romanowski embark on equally urgent pursuits that converge in a way neither of them suspects.
Nate, who’s been off the grid ever since his wife, Liv, was killed in a fire intended to kill him too in Three-Inch Teeth (2024), has sworn vengeance on murderous conspirator Axel Soledad. After shooting several of Soledad’s hirelings, he joins forces with his friend and fellow Special Forces vet Geronimo Jones, who’s tracked him down, to chase his quarry deep into the woods. Governor Spencer Rulon, meanwhile, has pressed Joe into service once again to find veteran hunting guide Spike Rankin and his new assistant, Mark Eisele, who just happens to be Rulon’s son-in-law. Although nobody’s heard from the men for two days, the governor doesn’t want his wife and daughter to know they’re missing, and that means not alerting the media or the local sheriff, who’s no fan of Rulon’s anyway. Readers who’ve already seen Rankin and Eisele overpowered and imprisoned by a mysterious crew they ran into while they were setting up for the elk hunting season will assume that Soledad is behind their kidnapping as well. But Box will keep everyone guessing about exactly how Soledad and the ragtag military cult he’s gathered around him plan to confront the military-industrial complex he’s persuaded them is a clear and present danger. You know you’re in for a wild ride when Joe, saying goodbye to Marybeth, his long-suffering wife, promises her, “I’ll do my job and not cross the line.”
Middling for this stellar series, which makes it another must-read, preferably in one sitting.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593851050
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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