“A strong mystery.” from death on telegraph hill
ROGUE
Sullivan, Mark Minotaur (384 pp.) $24.99 | Oct. 2, 2012 978-0-312-37851-6 Hide the good china: Sullivan (Triple Cross, 2009, etc.) launches a new series with even more helter-skelter action than his stratospheric average. After Robin Monarch quit the CIA when he realized that his mission to tap into an Al-Qaida computer for information about what turned out to be the sinister Green Fields project had been hopelessly corrupted, he went back to his roots. For Robin, orphaned young in Buenos Aires and raised by a community of thieves, that meant stealing stuff. Now, Constantine Belos, a pillar of the Russian Mafia who’s been following Robin’s career, wants him to find and steal a nuclear trigger before Belos’ Mafia rival, Omak, can purchase it from weapons dealer Boris Koporski, who moonlights, or daylights, as the President of Transdniestra. When Robin politely declines Belos’ offer of $5 million for the trigger, Belos detains his girlfriend, London editor Lacey Wentworth, and demands that Robin deliver the device for free within the next two weeks. Stung into action, Robin reassembles the team of forgettable professionals who worked with him on Green Fields and goes hunting for the trigger. But the team’s success in tracking it down is only the prelude to an endless series of bullet-laced confrontations, betrayals and rounds of torture that make it clear that in Robin’s world, even an offer you can’t refuse can always be renegotiated. The corruption, you’ll be happy to know, leads from the Mafia to the very highest levels of the CIA and the U.S. Senate. Makes you wonder. Sullivan, who most recently co-authored Private Games (2012) with James Patterson, has long since mastered the art of purging every bit of scenic or psychological interest from his exercises in can-you-top-this plotting. The closest analogies are summer movies from Entrapment to the Mission: Impossible franchise. (Agent: Meg Ruley)
DEATH ON TELEGRAPH HILL
Tallman, Shirley Minotaur (352 pp.) $24.99 | Oct. 16, 2012 978-1-250-01043-8
A San Francisco attorney’s determination to take on unusual cases is driving her parents crazy. In 1882, Oscar Wilde has come to town to read his poems and extol the benefits of the recently created aesthetic movement. After Sarah Woolson and her brother, Samuel, visit the Telegraph Hill home of newspaper publisher Mortimer Remy to hear and meet Wilde, Samuel is shot and badly wounded as they walk back down the Hill. Annoyed by the restrictions put |
upon women, Sarah resolves to investigate the shooting a lazy police officer writes off as an accident. Despite the protests of her parents and Robert Campbell, the attorney in love with her, Sarah returns to the Hill, which is home to a wide assortment of people, from wealthy Mrs. Montgomery to the poor and lazy writer whose wife just died in childbirth. While she’s nosing around, Sarah is shot at herself but luckily escapes with scratches. Meanwhile, she’s become involved in a case for the ASPCA, which is trying to prevent a wealthy Mexican from building a bullring in San Francisco. As both the pressure and the deaths mount, Sarah risks her life to find the answers. Tallman continues to surround her plucky, intelligent heroine (Scandal on Rincon Hill, 2010, etc.) with historical tidbits and a strong mystery.
MIXED SIGNALS
Tesh, Jane Poisoned Pen (250 pp.) $24.95 | paper $14.95 | Lg. Prt. $22.95 Oct. 2, 2012 978-1-4642-0061-8 978-1-4642-0063-2 paperback 978-1-4642-0062-5 Lg. Prt. A North Carolina private eye and his psychic pal combine their talents to solve a murder. David Randall, who’s in love with his fellow boarder, Kary, a college student who wants to help with his detective work, awaits his mother’s Christmas visit with mixed feelings because he knows she’ll want to talk about the death of his daughter in a car crash. In the meantime, his landlord, Camden, finds his friend, Jared Hunter, who’s been released from jail after his conviction for his part in a local museum break-in, dead in a pool of blood. Violent flashbacks make Cam feel that he’s connected to the killer. In addition to investigating the murder, David is vexed by a series of robberies that proceed apace despite the appearance of a clumsy superhero who calls himself the Parkland Avenger. Ambitious reporter Brooke Verner of the Parkland Herald, whose editor’s institutionalized son had served time along with Jared, is on the case of the Avenger. Branching out on his own, David discovers that the thieves are using a network of tunnels under the old part of town. As his mother continues her efforts to get David to talk about his sorrows, Kary joins a local superhero group that denies that the Avenger is a member, and Cam continues to have debilitating psychic revelations. Will David solve the murders and robberies in time to provide a merry Christmas? Randall’s second appearance (Stolen Hearts, 2011) combines a solid mystery with a plethora of suspects and quirky regulars.
kirkus.com
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mystery
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1 september 2012
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1873