Connelly does what he does best, combining excellent courtroom drama with personal stories that go beneath the surface and bring his characters to life. Mickey Haller is still doing business out of the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, and his employees include an ex-wife, her new husband, a chauffeur who owes him favors, and a newly-hired young lawyer with ambition. Haller himself is still that odd mixture of half selfish and half heart-of-gold that makes him an interesting character—the reader keeps rooting […]
A Mind Puzzle of a Crime Thriller
I’ve been a long-time fan of Deaver’s well-executed serial killer novels starring his dynamic duo Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs. His next series with Kathryn Dance was less inspired, and when he wrote the Ian Fleming knockoff Carte Blanche, I was worried that the old Deaver magic had gone walkabout. So I was happy to learn that Deaver has re-discovered his creative flair for the original and the bizarre in The October List. Don’t get me wrong—the writing itself is not stellar and the characters […]
Abductions, Dionysian Orgies and Mummified Corpses Oh My!
We’re back in Rome, where Detective Nic Costa gets drawn into the case of a missing 16-year-old American girl whose mother insists she was abducted by a mysterious man on a motorcycle in front of a bunch of disinterested Carabinieri. While few at police headquarters take the mother seriously—the girl’s been gone less than a day, after all—Nic suspects that something more is going on. For one thing, the girl is the spitting image of a girl abducted 16 years earlier, whose mummified corpse […]
Incest, murder and martyrdom in Italy–or is it?
Another in the series with young Roman cop Nic Costa, this one deals with the fall to his death of a man whose teenaged daughter is obsessed with an ancient Italian story from the 16th century, in which Beatrice Cenci, a girl sexually abused by her father, ends up murdering him, only to be beheaded by the Vatican as punishment. Mina Gabriel, along with her brother and mother, has a secret to hide, and it is Costa’s job to figure it out. Although the family […]
A trip through Dante’s Inferno
As a true lover of Dante’s Divine Comedy, I must confess that Brown’s choice of inspiration for his fourth Langdon novel hit just the right spot for me. While some readers may be bored by his lengthy descriptions of Dante’s cantos on the odyssey from Inferno and Purgatory to Paradise, I wanted more. Some readers may find his near tour-guide-style descriptions of Florence and Istanbul to be a divergence from the plot, but I was entranced and nearly salivating at the chance to visit […]
Like The Da Vinci Code, only better
Another Nic Costa crime thriller set in Rome, which reads less like a movie script and more like a subtler and fully-fleshed version of The Da Vinci Code. Young cop Nic Costa has recently been partnered with burned-out detective Luca Rossi and is sitting outside St. Marks Square trying to figure out how to survive the intense summer heat and humidity when reports of a shooting in the Vatican galvanizes the bored Costa into action. Despite strict instructions to steer clear of Vatican affairs, […]