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Review

Review

The Recruiter

by Jeff Ayers

Rick Carter, not his real name, walked away from his family ten years ago to keep them safe from the ramifications of his job. He is the best of the best when it comes to recruiting others to handle jobs notorious criminals want dealt with. Professional assassinations, smuggling, or dealing with trafficking issues while keeping those in the driver’s seat out of the spotlight? Call Rick. But even with his unscrupulous methods, Rick has a moral code. When he’s forced to find killers to eliminate a law-enforcement task force, he quickly learns that there is more at play than he realized, and now his family and entire criminal empire are about to end horribly. Podolski crafts a skillful and page-turning action thriller that does not let up for a second. Rick and his telling of the story make someone completely unlikeable into one whom the reader can root for to succeed. It’s hard to create empathetic characters when you build a world of criminals, but Podolski nails it. This looks like the start of a series, and the second one cannot come fast enough.

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Review

Return to Blood

by Willy Williams

Following his acclaimed debut, Better the Blood, Michael Bennett’s compelling sophomore outing in his crime series starring Māori detective Hana Westerman proves the New Zealand screenwriter and author is no one-hit wonder as a mystery writer. In the wake of the traumatic events recounted in the first book, Hana has resigned from the Auckland CIB (Criminal Investigation Branch) and returned to her hometown of Tātā Bay, where she helps her father, Eru, prepare local Māori teens to get their driver’s licenses. But the calm Hana is trying to rebuild is shattered when her 18-year-old daughter, Addison, discovers the skeleton of a young woman in the sand dunes. Investigators suspect the bones may be those of Kiri Thomas, a Māori teenager who disappeared four years earlier. Although Hana is no longer in the police force, she begins to probe the possibility that Kiri’s death may be connected to the 21-year-old unsolved murder of Paige Meadows, whose body was found in the same dunes. Likewise, Addison becomes obsessed with Kiri’s fate, threatening her friendship with her non-binary flatmate and musical partner, Plus 1. In a nod to Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, the storyline is interspersed with the dead Kiri’s haunting first-person narrative. Bennett, who is Māori, immerses readers deeper into Māori culture and traditions as he expands on Hana’s loving relationship with her father and tense interactions with her chilly second cousin, Eyes. An atmospheric thriller that will have readers booking flights to New Zealand. Bennett is adapting Better the Blood into a six-part TV series for Taika Waititi’s production company.

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Review

Blessed Water

by Henrietta Thornton

Perhaps only in New Orleans can there be a gay novice nun who is also a novice private detective and who offers up prayers like, “Hail Mary, share with me your divine vision, because I can’t see a fucking thing.” The nun in question is Sister Holiday, who teaches in a private school, runs a support group for survivors of Catholic Church sexual abuse, and on the side partners with a former cop to run Redemption Detective Agency. When the two hit the banks of the Mississippi to meet a new client, Holiday finds herself wading into the water to catch a body before it floats away. It’s her parish priest, and that awful discovery isn’t the last. Returning to school, the nun finds that another priest is missing. He seemed a kind young man, not one of the priests that Holiday loathes for their fake piety and fondness for their parishioners’ money. While a storm rages, Holiday must face the contradictions that are her life and life in New Orleans as well as help her brother and others face their demons, all while trying desperately to solve the mystery of the missing priest. Douaihy’s first in the series, Scorched Grace, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, among other accolades. Fans of that book, as well as all who love an irreverent and smart lead, will happily join Sister Holiday for her second outing.

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Review

The Recruiter

by Jeff Ayers

Rick Carter, not his real name, walked away from his family ten years ago to keep them safe from the ramifications of his job. He is the best of the best when it comes to recruiting others to handle jobs notorious criminals want dealt with. Professional assassinations, smuggling, or dealing with trafficking issues while keeping those in the driver’s seat out of the spotlight? Call Rick. But even with his unscrupulous methods, Rick has a moral code. When he’s forced to find killers to eliminate a law-enforcement task force, he quickly learns that there is more at play than he realized, and now his family and entire criminal empire are about to end horribly. Podolski crafts a skillful and page-turning action thriller that does not let up for a second. Rick and his telling of the story make someone completely unlikeable into one whom the reader can root for to succeed. It’s hard to create empathetic characters when you build a world of criminals, but Podolski nails it. This looks like the start of a series, and the second one cannot come fast enough

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Review

The Five Year Lie

by Henrietta Thornton

When nasty boss Edward Cafferty hires his spoiled, beautiful daughter, Ariel, to work at Chime, the video-doorbell business he runs with his much calmer brother, the rest of the staff keeps back. That maniac’s daughter? No thank you. But one colleague, Drew, isn’t afraid, and before you can say digital privacy invasion, the two are falling hard for each other. Fast forward five years and Drew is long gone, having abandoned Ariel and the job, ending the affair through email. Ariel later found his obituary and it seemed that was that. She’s now raising the child he never knew he had and struggling…well, not financially, given that Chime is a household name, but to keep up with the ubermoms at school and to give her sweet son the happiest upbringing possible. Then the bombshell: a text from Drew asking her to meet, a message that leads to an upending of everything she thought she knew about the man and a dangerous journey to find out the truth and save her family. The marriage of surveillance technology and the legal system is closely examined here to thought provoking results, as are the effects of technology on our personal lives. Ariel is a character who readers will root hard for, and they’ll follow her narrow escapes until late into the night on a just-one-more-page quest to see her to safety. A satisfying rollercoaster.

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Review

Love Letters to a Serial Killer

by Henrietta Thornton and Brian Kenney

Deeply disturbing pals up with darkly comic to create one heck of a morbid ride. Thirty-something Hannah is a little lost. Her work in a non-profit in Minneapolis is as meaningless as her occasional hook-ups with self-centered guys who only want one thing. The light of her life? True crime, specifically the unfolding story of a murderer in Atlanta who has killed four women and is quickly identified as William, a good-looking lawyer. From combing the true-crime forums by night and the news articles by day, Hannah’s interest in William blossoms until she takes the next step: she writes to him. Thus begins a correspondence that works its way from hatred to love, as all the while her life crumbles around her. By the time the trial is announced, Hannah has nothing to stop her from driving to Georgia, spending weeks observing the proceedings, and hanging out with the other true-crime weirdos (too judgy? I don’t think so). But as in all good crime books, nothing is as it seems, and the truth sends Hannah—and the reader—spinning in a completely surprising direction.

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Review

Wordhunter

by Henrietta Thornton

Many of us remember an early teacher fondly, and for Maggie Moore it’s Ms. Barker, the seventh-grade teacher who taught Maggie to diagram sentences. Maggie’s now studying forensic linguistics—the kind of analysis that allows researchers to determine if Shakespeare was the real author of a given work—and is by far the best student in the program. She’s thrilled when Professor Ditmire invites her to be his research assistant and recommends her to the local police, whose broke department can hire only a student to uncover the author of vicious notes that are being left at crime scenes. Maggie is glad of the work: she’s facing graduation soon with no job prospects, and more importantly to her, she might now be able to get the police to investigate the disappearance of her best friend years before, a case they never took seriously. Grammar lovers and anyone who likes a quirky protagonist—Maggie’s no stereotypical nerd, she’s a foulmouthed, tattooed diner waitress who drinks way too much—will find Maggie’s sentence-diagramming habit and her brilliant mind fascinating while following her to a linguistic triumph. Sands’s other books are true crime, and fans of that genre who want a fictional readalike can do no better than picking up Wordhunter.

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Review

Miss Austen Investigates: The Hapless Milliner

by Henrietta Thornton

Jane Austen’s throngs of fans will adore this series starter that introduces the writer as a lively amateur sleuth; a treasured member of a large, loving family; and as a woman of her time—feisty but too often kept from her potential. The marriage market among Jane’s circle looms large, of course, with Jane hoping for a proposal any day from a young Irishman while those around her assess one another in terms of their potential as financial insurance. When an alliance is about to be announced by a local family, their façade of gentility is threatened when a young woman is found murdered in their home. Jane recognizes her as a milliner she’s bought from lately. The local magistrate seems content to blame “gypsies” for the crime, an accusation Jane disputes as no traveling people have been seen in the area lately, but she’s soon sorry when another is accused: her mentally disabled brother, George. It’s now up to our literary hero to find the real killer and bring George home. The large cast of characters here keeps things lively; there’s often humor too, both in Jane’s wry comments throughout and in her witty letters to her sister about the case’s progression.

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Review

Very Bad Company

by Brian Kenney

A delightful satire—fun, fast, and furious—of the high-flying tech industry. Every year adtech start-up Aurora brings together its top executives for a weekend retreat (think PowerPoint presentations and Jet Skis), this year, it’s in Miami Beach. It’s quite a cast of characters: for starters, the CEO models himself on Churchill. In the hands of other novelists, the cast could become a messy menagerie. But each character here is so well-defined, beginning with the company’s latest hire, Caitlin Levy, Head of Events (curious since Aurora has never sponsored an event). But just when the second day has started and everyone is beginning to sober up, there’s the announcement that the company has been sold, and suddenly everyone is if not very, very rich, then quite rich. It would be time to celebrate, except that one of the high-level executives has disappeared. And the entire retreat is under surveillance by the tech media, who can sniff a good story. Like Rosenblum’s first novel, Bad Summer People, this novel delights in exploring what lies under the surface. The adtech folks would call that a deep dive.

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Review

I Will Ruin You

by Jeff Ayers

Richard Boyle teaches 11th-grade English, and during class one morning, he looks out his window and sees a former student walking toward the entrance with a bomb strapped to his chest. He takes matters into his own hands and ends up confronting the bomber, who wants to see three specific individuals so he can complete his mission. Richard ends up saving everyone, but the bomber trips and blows himself up. Now a hero, Richard learns that his actions have made some people angry, including the bomber’s parents and a blackmailer with dirt on Richard, though he has no idea what that might be. In his case, good deeds are punished. To reveal any more of the story would spoil some neat surprises. Barclay immediately turns up the intense narrative and creates a page-turner that could quickly turn toward uncomfortable territory due to its subject matter, but since he is a master, he avoids that realm completely. Instead, we have a psychological and paranoid thriller that fires on all cylinders.

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