Graveland

April 22, 2013
The third in Edgar-finalist Glynn’s loosely knit series of financial thrillers (after 2011’s Bloodland) starts with a promising setup. New York City journalist Ellen Dorsey, who specializes in long political profiles, becomes intrigued by two recent murders: that of an investment banker, shot dead while jogging in Central Park; and, later the same day, that of a hedge fund manager, gunned down outside a swanky Manhattan restaurant. While the police bumble around and the media buzz about a coordinated attack on Wall Street executives, Dorsey seeks to connect the killings. The case’s logical conclusion comes in the form of a standoff and gun battle in a tenement, but there’s still about a third of the book to go. Glynn follows a few plotlines that have little pop and ties up a thread from the series opener, 2009’s Winterland. Readers may feel that the experience is like watching the stock market ticker on an uneventful day. Agent: Antony Harwood, Antony Harwood Ltd.

April 15, 2013
Glynn (Bloodland, 2012, etc.) peers once more beneath the surface of the Big Apple's financial sector and finds enough vermin to keep an army of exterminators busy. Extermination, in fact, seems to be the order of the day. Hours after investment banker Jeff Gale is shot to death while jogging alone in Central Park, hedge fund manager Bob Holland is executed outside his apartment building under the eyes of his wife and a dozen other horrified witnesses. Has someone declared open season on the city's financial elite? Freelance investigative reporter Ellen Dorsey soon finds evidence that, yes, indeed, someone has. Convinced that the third target is Scott Lebrecht, of Black Vine Partners, she's torn between running to the cops and hanging onto a story she'll lose control of as soon as it's out in the public domain. At the same time, James Vaughan, the indomitable chairman of Oberon Capital Group, suddenly feeling his age of 84, is withdrawing from Oberon, leaving Chief Operating Officer Craig Howley to fend for himself in a pit of vipers; Frank Bishop, who first lost his position as an architect and then his infinitely lower-tier job managing an electronics store in a dying mall, worries because his beloved daughter Lizzie isn't returning his calls; and the regional media market is transfixed by the trial of Connie Carillo, a senator's daughter and a mob boss' ex, for the stabbing of her husband, Howard Meeker, a subplot that casts a shadow as long as any Thomas Pynchon conspiracy over the whole tale without any of its leading players ever appearing outside television screens. Since Howard was an investment banker too, could his killer be behind the current vendetta, or is the connection more subtle and insidious? Glynn couldn't hit all his marks without a brisk, no-nonsense style that keeps the pot boiling vigorously till the midpoint, when the pressure abruptly drops till the whole sad carnival comes down at the end with an oddly muted crash.

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May 1, 2013
Investigative journalist Jimmy Gilroy, who first appeared in Bloodland (2011), has a small role in Glynn's third crime story, but it's Gilroy's hard-bitten colleague, Ellen Dorsey, who's in the limelight here. The action starts with the murder of a jogger in Central Park. Not just any guy, the victim worked for one of the city's megabucks Wall Street investment firms. Dorsey fleetingly wonders if there's a story in the murder, but, just when she's about to go on to another article, a second financial gurua well-known hedge-fund mangeris killed. Close on the heels of his death is an attack on a member of a hugely successful private-equity group. Are terrorists wiping out Wall Street elites? Dorsey is hooked, especially after she meets Frank Bishop, an out-of-work architect caught in the stranglehold of the current economic downturn. What began as a rather routine crime story takes a redeeming left turn midway, but this undisguised attack on the financial district still lacks the punch of Glynn's previous books and will appeal most to patient readers whose investment portfolios are safe and secure.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)