SLEIGHT OF HAND
hanging from a barn rafter. No longer welcomed in the pub by xenophobic countrymen, and told by his superiors to leave off harassing the boys, Glyn can find solace only in his encounter with Sally, Boon’s adopted mother, whose travails include an ex who absconded with a student and subtle bits of racism aimed at her son. But shortly after Sally and Glyn tentatively reach out for one another, the current husband of Glyn’s ex-wife descends asking for a bit of advice, and investigation shows that more girls than the misplaced hitchhiker have vanished from the village in the past. Convinced that Boon and probably several of the females are dead and possibly buried in the countryside, Glyn makes several incorrect assumptions that lead to a final revenge scenario upending his notions of what good people can be driven to while their friends turn a blind eye. The sexual peccadilloes are not for the squeamish, but the plot twists are cunning, and Glyn Capaldi is the most appealing antihero this side of John Rebus.
Margolin, Phillip Harper/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $26.99 | Apr. 9, 2013 978-0-06-206991-7 Washington, D.C. shamus Dana Cutler (Capitol Murder, 2012, etc.) goes up against an impossibly clever killer: an amateur magician who’s also a member of the bar. The legal eagles who find Charles Benedict intelligent and charming would undoubtedly be surprised to know that he’s also a stone-cold killer who doesn’t flinch from liquidating the occasional thorn in the side of his associate Nikolai Orlansky, a pillar of the Russian Mafia. Fresh from his latest such favor for Orlansky, Benedict decides that it would be fun to have sex with Carrie Blair, a narcotics prosecutor who’s having another quarrel with her much older husband, Horace, a wealthy businessman. So he drugs her, takes her home, drugs her again, has his way with her and then demands $250,000 for suppressing the evidence that she’s violated her prenup. Alas, their negotiating session ends with Carrie’s death, and now Benedict, who never planned this murder, realizes that he’ll have to do some fancy footwork indeed if he’s to avoid serious jail time. But great illusionists are also great improvisers, and soon enough, Benedict has not only framed Horace very convincingly for his wife’s murder, but has also gotten Horace to hire him as his defense attorney. He’ll get away with his crime scot-free unless Detective Frank Santoro, of the Lee County police, joins forces with Dana, back in town after a wild goose chase after the priceless and totally fictitious Ottoman Scepter, to take equally resourceful measures against him. They do, he’s trapped, and then the tale is over. Margolin presents another triumph of inventive plotting over paper-thin characterization, flat prose and a wholesale departure from realism. The result is on a par with an especially good episode of Columbo. (Author appearances in Seattle and Portland)
A SERPENT’S TOOTH
Johnson, Craig Viking (352 pp.) $26.95 | Apr. 23, 2013 978-0-670-02645-6
The vast, lonely spaces of rural Wyoming attract some unusual lifestyles. It’s up to Sheriff Walt Longmire to sort the good from the bad. Longmire’s problems start when Cord Lynear, a Mormon “lost boy” who’s been thrown out of a polygamous Mormon compound so that the older men can have their choice of women, wanders into Absaroka County looking for his mother. Assisting Longmire, as usual, are his friend Henry Standing Bear, aka The Cheyenne Nation, and his deputy Victoria Moretti, a tough, beautiful woman he considers much too young for him. Among the strange people he turns up in his quest are a man who claims to be 200-year-old Mormon enforcer Orrin Porter Rockwell; Cord’s grandmother, Eleanor Tisdale, who runs a bar and store in the tiny town of Short Drop; Roy Lynear, who owns a large, heavily fortified ranch and who may be Cord’s father; and Tomás Bidarte, a Mexican poet who’s handy with a knife. A visit to another Lynear compound in South Dakota leads to a run-in with more lost boys and a confrontation with yet more Lynears. A little help from a friend in the CIA identifies Rockwell as CIA agent Dale Tisdale, reportedly killed in a plane crash in Mexico. When someone burns the sheriff substation and almost kills one of his deputies, Longmire and his friends take actions that may be the death of them. Longmire’s ninth (As the Crow Flies, 2012, etc.) is a tense, action-filled story with Johnson’s usual touches of humor and romance. No wonder Longmire’s TV series has been renewed for a second season.
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15 february 2013
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fiction
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kirkus.com
KILLER HONEYMOON
McKevett, G.A. Kensington (304 pp.) $24.00 | Mar. 26, 2013 978-0-7582-7651-3
Murder disrupts a newlywed detective’s shot at connubial bliss. At their long-awaited nuptials, private eye Savannah Reid (A Decadent Way to Die, 2011, etc.) agreed to take her longtime admirer, police detective Dirk Coulter, for better or worse. Grumpiness? Fine. Snoring? OK. But starting the first day of their honeymoon on the island paradise of Santa Tesla by watching a woman die of gunshot wounds? Unacceptable! Even worse, Savannah and Dirk hear |