The game’s afoot once again for 20-something genius sleuth Isaiah Quintabe, who has two cases to deal with: one leading him to mayhem in Las Vegas, the other to the man responsible for his brother’s death.
Things are pretty much as we left them with Isaiah in Ide’s acclaimed debut mystery/thriller, IQ (2016). He’s still leading a mostly solitary life in his East Long Beach, California, neighborhood, using his agile intellect to help old ladies find lost jewelry, chase away abusive ex-husbands, or deal with volatile gang members who think he’s too smart for his own good. The one case he’d most like to crack involves the hit-and-run death of his beloved older brother, Marcus. Just as he’s finally figured out that Marcus’ death was no accident, IQ gets a call from drop-dead-gorgeous Sarita Van, his late brother’s one-time fiancee, who's now a high-powered attorney. She wants him to find her younger sister, Janine, a Vegas-based club DJ who shares a gambling addiction with her ne’er-do-well boyfriend, Benny. They’re on the run from Leo, a vicious loan shark, whose collector in chief is a 7-foot-tall, broad-shouldered, dead-eyed Canadian named Balthazar. Isaiah’s only backup on this mission is his short-fused but dauntless neighborhood buddy, Dodson, whose own plate is full trying to make his food truck profitable and waiting for his wife to give birth to their first child. Once on the Vegas strip, this post-Millennial Holmes and Watson get far more than they bargained for as they have to fight and think their way through waves of Chinese mob muscle led by a baleful sex trafficker leaning heavily on Sarita and Janine’s craven, corrupt father. Ide weaves the often antic events of this case in tandem with Isaiah’s lonesome inquiry into his brother’s death; a pursuit that leads him to the sinister Seb Habimana, an East African refugee who’s made his mark in Isaiah’s hood in shady real estate dealings and shadier money laundering operations. The plots of these separate cases collide as much as they interweave, and Ide can sometimes go a little too long and deep on background info. But he keeps your head in the game throughout with his witty style and edgy storytelling, both of which show greater assurance than in his first novel—and even bigger potential for the future.
A thrilling follow-up to one of the more auspicious detective-series debuts in recent memory.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-26777-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS
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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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
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A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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