critically acclaimed author of the Frank Marr tril David Swinson
Joe Kenda’s All Is Not Forgiven is a wonderful, authentic read, told as through a casual conversation with a friend. It is an energizing and entertaining trip into Sin City’s seedy underbelly viewed through both sides of the law. Pick this one up.”
AudioFile
Gripping from the start, true-crime TV star Joe Kenda’s debut novel is an entertaining and quick-paced fictionalized version of a case Kenda handled as a rookie detective in the 1970s. Narrated skillfully by Bradford Hastings, Tim Campbell, and Kenda himself, the audiobook benefits from their ability to produce a variety of voices for the fascinating cast of characters.”
Jeffrey Fleishman
All Is Not Forgiven is vicious fun. In his debut novel, real-life homicide detective Joe Kenda unreels a taut, swift story of murder, money, lust, international intrigue, and a sublime bit of revenge.”
New York Times bestselling author of Windfall Wendy Corsi Staub
Entering the crime-fiction scene with the veritable, visceral voice of a veteran homicide detective, Joe Kenda delivers an addictive debut novel. All Is Not Forgiven is the perfect spine-chiller for a steamy summer night.”
author of Beneath Cruel Waters Jon Bassoff
Joe Kenda’s debut novel is an impressive hard-boiled police procedural written by a man that knows a thing or two about criminal investigations. From the seedy brothels of Copenhagen, to the rugged mountains of Colorado, All Is Not Forgiven is a fast-moving and fascinating crime novel that vividly illustrates the monsters in our midst—and the detectives tasked with bringing them to justice.”
New York Times bestselling author Tod Goldberg
All Is Not Forgiven hums with brutal authenticity—Kenda the author and Kenda the character both deliver big procedural thrills that will keep readers guessing. I don’t remember a debut novel this assured—Kenda is the real deal.”
author of Good Night Forever Jeffrey Fleishman
All Is Not Forgiven is vicious fun. In his debut novel, real-life homicide detective Joe Kenda unreels a taut, swift story of murder, money, lust, international intrigue, and a sublime bit of revenge.”
NOVEMBER 2023 - AudioFile
Gripping from the start, true-crime TV star Joe Kenda's debut novel is an entertaining and quick-paced fictionalized version of a case Kenda handled as a rookie detective in the 1970s. Narrated skillfully by Bradford Hastings, Tim Campbell, and Kenda himself, the audiobook benefits from their ability to produce a variety of voices for the fascinating cast of characters. At its core, the story focuses on a hit man who murders rich wives at the behest of their husbands, but it is the other characters whose personalities make the audiobook so satisfying, including veteran detective Lee Wilson, other police and FBI agents, and various mob underlings. D.J.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2023-05-09
“The story and its characters are made up, mostly,” indicates Kenda in a headnote to this distantly fact-based crime yarn set in 1975. Both the acknowledgment and its casual tone are entirely apt.
When Dallas heiress Kathryn Montgomery is shot dead with six soft wadcutter bullets in her plush Colorado Springs home, suspicion naturally falls on her husband. Fred Montgomery, who’s enjoyed limited success as an expert witness on engineering matters, ducks the initial questions of Det. Lee Wilson and his rookie partner, Det. Joe Kenda, shows up for a second attempt with a high-priced lawyer and presents an alibi—he was in Las Vegas causing such a ruckus that the security detail at the Whitehorse Casino kept a constant eye on him—that’s too good to be true. And Wilson and Kenda are quite correct: Montgomery hired pathologically sadistic freelance killer Bruno Kleiss, if that’s his real name, to rid himself of his inconvenient wife and reopen the tap she’d shut off to her money. So where’s the mystery? It partly concerns the figure of retired SAS Capt. Laurence Haywood, another hired killer, who’s been pulled out of his second retirement and sent to Colorado on an unspecified errand, and partly concerns the question of just how many anecdotes, digressions, and flips back and forth between Kenda’s first-person narrative and the third-person narrative that covers developments outside his ken the author will cram in. Readers inclined to skip over the padding will be left with a story that’s neither substantial nor mysterious but one that Kenda keeps moving right along.
Chatty, meandering, and intermittently gruesome. Now there’s a combination you rarely see.
