Blood and Roses

Some readers of Alexander’s second Holly Jennings thriller (after 2013’s Daddy’s Home) may have trouble taking seriously a female police investigator who says things like: “trust me, boys, we have stumbled onto a tangled mess. Woman’s intuition.” Holly, a former San Diego PD detective now working CSI, investigates the murder of two jockeys, who were shot to death and left with carrots in their mouths. The case takes her to L.A., where the body of movie producer Marvin Tieg, who owns race horses, has been found at his Hollywood home with a carrot in his mouth—though instead of shooting Tieg, the killer touched a fine blowtorch flame to the victim’s legs, a cruel method used to treat equine leg injuries. Occasional short chapters about horses will interest horse lovers, but don’t help the narrative flow. And describing “a good guy gone bad” as having “once been so high the president would have had to look up to him” is the sort of hyperbole that undermines plausibility. (Aug.)