A thoughtful thriller that shines a light into the art world’s dark corners.
The untimely demise of a provocative young filmmaker consumes a museum copy editor in this sequel to Still Lives (2018).
After spending the summer in Vermont recovering from a run-in with a murderer, Rocque Museum copy editor Maggie Richter is ready to tell her friends and colleagues in Los Angeles that she isn’t coming back. Then her boss, Janis Rocque, emails with a tantalizing proposition. Several months ago, Brenae Brasil—a grad student at the prestigious Los Angeles Art College—shot herself. Janis claims she has inside knowledge that Brenae’s death was “more complicated than it seemed” and is willing to handsomely compensate Maggie—a former journalist—if she’ll investigate the school’s culture and use discretion in publishing her findings. Maggie returns to California, where she learns that Brenae sent Janis a copy of an unreleased movie titled Lesson in Red, which shows Brenae having coerced sex with an unidentified man. According to authorities, the work is one of two deleted from Brenae’s computer after she died but before her body was discovered. Determined to uncover the truth, Maggie infiltrates Brenae’s social circle and, with the help of special agent Ray Hendricks, starts digging. This novel might occasionally lose readers unfamiliar with the plot and key players from Still Lives. The story feels overstuffed and the denouement relies too heavily on coincidence, but Hummel delivers a searing indictment of the artistic community’s bias toward White men and the exploitations that follow.
A thoughtful thriller that shines a light into the art world’s dark corners.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64009-431-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.
A much-beloved author gives a favorite recurring character her own novel.
Holly Gibney made her first appearance in print with a small role in Mr. Mercedes (2014). She played a larger role in The Outsider (2018). And she was the central character in If It Bleeds, a novella in the 2020 collection of the same name. King has said that the character “stole his heart.” Readers adore her, too. One way to look at this book is as several hundred pages of fan service. King offers a lot of callbacks to these earlier works that are undoubtedly a treat for his most loyal devotees. That these easter eggs are meaningless and even befuddling to new readers might make sense in terms of costs and benefits. King isn’t exactly an author desperate to grow his audience; pleasing the people who keep him at the top of the bestseller lists is probably a smart strategy, and this writer achieved the kind of status that whatever he writes is going to be published. Having said all that, it’s possible that even his hardcore fans might find this story a bit slow. There are also issues in terms of style. Much of the language King uses and the cultural references he drops feel a bit creaky. The word slacks occurs with distracting frequency. King uses the phrase keeping it on the down-low in a way that suggests he probably doesn’t understand how this phrase is currently used—and has been used for quite a while. But the biggest problem is that this narrative is framed as a mystery without delivering the pleasures of a mystery. The reader knows who the bad guys are from the start. This can be an effective storytelling device, but in this case, waiting for the private investigator heroine to get to where the reader is at the beginning of the story feels interminable.
Loyal King stans may disagree, but this is a snooze.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668016138
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
The most richly accomplished of the brothers’ pairings to date—and given Connelly’s high standards, that’s saying a lot.
Harry Bosch and the Lincoln Lawyer team up to exonerate a woman who’s already served five years for killing her ex-husband.
The evidence against Lucinda Sanz was so overwhelming that she followed the advice of Frank Silver, the B-grade attorney who’d elbowed his way onto her defense, and pleaded no contest to manslaughter to avoid a life sentence for shooting Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Roberto Sanz in the back as he stalked out of her yard after their latest argument. But now that her son, Eric, is 13, old enough to get recruited by local gangs, she wants to be out of stir and at his side. So she writes to Mickey Haller, who asks his half-brother for help. After all his years working for the LAPD, Bosch is adamant about not working for a criminal defendant, even though Haller’s already taken him on as an associate so that he can get access to private health insurance and a UCLA medical trial for an experimental cancer treatment. But the habeas corpus hearing Haller’s aiming for isn’t, strictly speaking, a criminal defense proceeding, and even a cursory examination of the forensic evidence raises Bosch’s hackles. Bolstered by Bosch’s discoveries and a state-of-the-art digital reconstruction of the shooting, Haller heads to court to face Assistant Attorney General Hayden Morris, who has a few tricks up his own sleeve. The endlessly resourceful courtroom back-and-forth is furious in its intensity, although Haller eventually upstages Bosch, Morris, and everyone else in sight. What really stands out here, however, is that Connelly never lets you forget, from his title onward, the life-or-death issues behind every move in the game.
The most richly accomplished of the brothers’ pairings to date—and given Connelly’s high standards, that’s saying a lot.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780316563765
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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