A police chief must solve the murder of a family member.
Chief Lewellyn Ferris is knee-deep in her reelection campaign when some kids attempt to detain a man they claim is a sexual predator. One of them is the granddaughter of Lew’s significant other, forensic dentist and fishing fanatic Doc Osborne. The accused is Noah McDonough, son of acerbic, wealthy Grace, who owns enough land in Wisconsin’s Lake Country to give her a lot of power. Meanwhile, Lew’s brother, Pete, who’s been watching a loon’s nest in an effort to protect the fledglings, is attacked and killed. The wife he’d planned to divorce, who can’t get the funeral over with fast enough, announces that he had a heart attack. A suspicious Lew calls in an outsider to do an autopsy that reveals Pete was murdered. Lew calls on Ray Pradt, a friend, fishing guide, and tracker, who discovers a pry bar thrown in the woods and several trail cameras that may have captured images of the killer. To Lew’s surprise, Pete’s murder may be linked to Grace McDonough, who’s secretly planning on selling a parcel of land along a pristine river to a mining company. When Grace is found dead in another faked accident and Lew learns that her sister-in-law was having an affair with the appraiser involved in Grace’s planned sale, she has to decide if the motive is love or money.
Houston’s loving portrayals of the continuing cast members and the wild Wisconsin settings add up to a charming read.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64385-800-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
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In present-day Germany, a woman burdened with the darkest of secrets from her brutal childhood becomes an unwitting participant in a fatal game of murder and deceit.
“You become normal by doing normal things,” Nadja Kulka’s therapist tells her, and for the most part the technique has worked. Nadja has a good job in the office of one of Berlin’s most successful lawyers and a secure if barren personal life. “I’m the woman who sits at the open window of her kitchen when she sees that her neighbour has friends over again on a Saturday night,” she explains. Social gatherings cause Nadja acute anxiety, and when the novel opens, she is in the grip of a panic attack that causes her to faint at a gas station and then to flee back onto the motorway, fearing that onlookers may have called the police. But why? And why is she wearing a blond wig? In this feverish, relentlessly tense novel, the answers to those and many other questions lie tangentially in Nadja’s past—to which the narrative cyclically returns—but more immediately in a sudden act of violence into which she is cruelly drawn. As dastardly events unfold, we are kept on edge not only by the author’s initially skillful evocation of Nadja’s troubled consciousness, but also by the novel’s restless shuttling between past and present. The eventual cinching together of near and distant events is clumsily handled, however, and the denouement utterly overwrought. A parallel plot involves the yearnings of a young woman who longs to escape her hometown backwater, embarks on an affair with a married visitor to her family’s inn, and pays a terrible price for her longings. Rather than enriching the novel, however, this drama, though potentially engrossing, seems more like a distraction.
A superficially gripping but psychologically unconvincing thriller.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-82479-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
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BOOK REVIEW
A bracing test of the maxim that “the department always comes first. The department always wins.”
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Meet today’s LAPD, with both good and bad apples reduced to reacting to crimes defensively instead of trying to prevent them, unless of course they’re willing to break the rules.
New Year’s Eve 2020 finds Detective Renée Ballard, survivor of rape and Covid-19, partnered with Detective Lisa Moore, of Hollywood’s Sexual Assault Unit, in search of leads on the Midnight Men, a tag team of rapists who assaulted women on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve without leaving any forensic evidence behind. The pair are called to the scene of a shooting that would have gone to West Bureau Homicide if the unit weren’t already stretched to the limit, a case that should be handed over to West Bureau ASAP. But Ballard gets her teeth into the murder of body shop owner Javier Raffa, who reportedly bought his way out of the gang Las Palmas. The news that Raffa’s been shot by the same weapon that killed rapper Albert Lee 10 years ago sends Ballard once more to Harry Bosch, the poster boy for retirements that drive the LAPD crazy. Both victims had taken on silent partners in order to liquidate their debts, and there’s every indication that the partners were linked. That’s enough for Ballard and Bosch to launch a shadow investigation even as Ballard, abandoned by Moore, who’s flown the coop for the weekend, works feverishly to identify the Midnight Men on her own. As usual in this stellar series, the path to the last act is paved with false leads, interdepartmental squabbles, and personal betrayals, and the structure sometimes sways in the breeze. But no one who follows Ballard and Bosch to the end will be disappointed.
A bracing test of the maxim that “the department always comes first. The department always wins.”Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-48564-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
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