A crunchy detective novel set in the world of California surfers.
Two beach-lovers set up a detective agency in Jones’ mystery novel, the second in a series.
Thad Hanlon, surfer and certified public accountant, has just opened a private investigation business in the Five Cities area of the California Central Coast. He and his new partner, attorney and martial artist Bri de la Guerra, are both reeling from the deaths of their significant others three years ago—and both are eager to get their agency off the ground by landing an inaugural client. A case arrives just in the nick of time, right outside the Land Cruiser out of which Thad and his 3-year-old son are currently living: Krystle Dudamel, a former exotic dancer from Bakersfield, is looking for her missing 14-year-old son Mobius, a surfing prodigy known around the Pismo Pier as Moby Dude. “The kid was respectable for a 14-year-old but very aggro,” narrates Hanlon. “Always snaking some local’s swell and cutting them off. Being hyper-aggressive in the water is not the best way to win friends and influence people.” Could Mobius’ disappearance be linked to the murder of a local gang member, whose body was recently disinterred from the Oceano Beach sand? Hanlon and Bri will have to find out…that is, if they ever want to secure a second client. Jones’ prose effectively conveys Hanlon’s laid-back attitude, and the plot features a number of entertaining, surfer-specific elements, as when Hanlon finds a message encoded in a pile of boards: “They were stacked helter-skelter, the top side of the boards facing up. No serious surfer would do that. Leave boards in direct sunlight for the wax to melt. Strange. Had to be a cipher. Had to be some kind of message.” Neither Hanlon nor Bri appearto be particularly haunted by their losses, but it may simply be that the book’s lighthearted tone has little space for mourning. Instead, Jones delivers a proper beach read, both in form and content.
A crunchy detective novel set in the world of California surfers.Pub Date: March 17, 2025
ISBN: 9781509260218
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2025
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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