A complex and atmospheric story of a crime in a First Nations community.
In Van Clieaf’s mystery series starter, the kidnapping of an Indigenous girl in rural Canada catapults a detective sergeant into an investigation involving corruption and human trafficking.
This well-paced procedural, told from the perspective of the victims, police officers, and criminologists on the case, ties in stories of past and present abuse. After 11-year-old Carey Bolton is abducted from her hometown in northern British Columbia, her cousin, a student in Vancouver, enlists the help of Morgan O’Meara, a filmmaker and teacher of Anishinaabe and Irish heritage. Morgan and her partner, Lucas Arenas, who’s a Guatemalan immigrant of Ixil-Maya descent and professor of criminology, begin looking into the disappearance with and without the help of police. Things become dangerous for Morgan after she visits a seedy flophouse and a swanky members’ club; she survives an attack, thanks to a passerby who happens to be off-duty detective sergeant Alex Desocarras. Details of police work effectively alternate with stories of Morgan’s recovery, Lucas’ memories of his past, and Carey’s grim imprisonment. As the investigation narrows its focus, the team uncovers links to dirty cops and international traffickers. Overall, Van Clieaf’s novel explores complexities of identity in depth, as simmering tensions between authorities and Indigenous communities feed into the main plot. Less compelling, however, are the book’s extended ruminations on Guatemalan colonial history, although the author cites reference works—some more recent than others—for readers who wish to dig deeper. Fans of the fourth season of True Detective, starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, will appreciate the moody ambience and subject matter; those left wanting more can explore the second volume of the Alex Desocarras series, Red Paint (2020).
A complex and atmospheric story of a crime in a First Nations community.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2021
ISBN: 9780995218031
Page Count: 273
Publisher: Porteous Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.
Lt. Eve Dallas and her colleagues in the New York Police and Security Department step outside their comfort zone into counterterrorism.
Back in 2024, during the stressful time of the Urban Wars, a courageous band calling themselves The Twelve fought Dominion and other violent fringe groups that sought to end civilization as we know it, despite the presence of a traitor in their own midst. Now, 37 years later, someone’s killed Giovanni Rossi, a retired cybersecurity expert who was one of The Twelve, an hour or so after a summons—ostensibly from another veteran of the group—brought him from Rome to New York. On the body, officers called to the scene find a copy of Dallas’ business card that’s been embellished with a flamboyant threat to annihilate the seven surviving members of The Twelve. Obligingly inviting all seven to New York—a move you’d think would make it a lot easier for their nemesis to wipe them all out at once—Dallas soon forms a theory about the killer’s identity and sets a trap to draw him out. But her plan turns into a narrow miss, upping the stakes on both sides, for now the killer knows Dallas is on to him. It’s in the nature of the case that there’s less mystery and detection than usual in this long-running franchise—the biggest surprise turns out to be the connection between Dallas and her quarry—but the thrills keep on coming, and the final interrogation, though highly predictable in its broad outlines, is as satisfying as ever.
Forget the tangled backstory, focus on the game of cat and mouse, and enjoy.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370792
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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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